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A MAN'S THOUGHTS 



'Homo sum; humani nihil a. me alienum puto.' — Terence. 

' Believe with Lord Monboddo that man sprang from an 
ape, or with yon' learned divine that he descends from the 
angels, he is still — a man.' — Mackenzie, 1781. 

' If a company keeps a steam fire engine, the firemen need 
not be straining themselves all day to squirt over the top of the 
flagstaff. Let them wash some of their lower storey windows a 
little.' — Oliver Wendell Holmes. 



Man's Thoughts 



BY 

J? HAIN FRISWELL 
t' 

AUTHOR OF 'THE GENTLE LIFE 




LONDON 

Sampson Low, Marston, Low, & Searle 

Crown Buildings, 188 Fleet Street 

1872 

All rights reserved 






LONDON : PRINTED BY 

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 

AND PARLIAMENT STREET 



DEDICATED 

TO THE 



REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY, M.A. 



CANON OF CHESTER 
&c. &c. &c. 



BY ONE WHO IS PROUD TO BE NUMBERED 



AMONGST A GOOD MAN'S FRIENDS 



AD VER TISEMENT. 

A PORTION of this book has appeared in the 
' Leader,' the ' London Review,' or in other 
periodicals. The title under which these 
Essays now appear has been chosen more on 
account of its unobtrusive and negative character 
than for any other reason. If an author has no 
other recommendation, he may at least claim to 
be A MAN. 




CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTION EGOTISM. 

The Central Vowel and First Numeral — Egotism —Its Universality 
— Belief in Self — Egotism of Great Men— Birth — Punishment of 
Self-Pride — Difficulty in believing that we are Obnoxious or 
Hateful — Self-Examination .... PAGE I 



CHAPTER II. 

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 
I' — Self and its Importance — Conscience 



19 



CHAPTER III. 

OF MANLY READINESS. 

Valour — The Workers in Life — The Norse-Man — Hamlet on Readi- 
ness — Procrastination — The Winning Moment — Making up 
' Minds ' — Self-Help — Early Rising — Readiness . . 33 



x CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE HEROIC IN LIFE. 

A Savage Young Couple — Love — The Heroic — Self-Delusion— 
Effeminate Heroes— A Narrow Age — True Heroism page 47 



CHAPTER V. 

WHICH TREATS OF LARGE NATURES. 

' School ' — The Manager — Lear and Hamlet — Money's True Power 
— The Age of Elizabeth— Higher Levels — But One Man Wanted 
—Large Minds Dominated by Small Ones — The Happy Wife — 
Salt of the Earth . . . - . . .61 

CHAPTER VI. 

SELF-CULTURE, SELF-RESTRAINT, AND SELF-RESPECT. 

The Tub of Diogenes — Conquerors not great — Byron's Dog — Culture 
of Self— Prudence: its Value — Life, beautiful and free — Men are 
not Machines — Self-respect — The Hermit of Hampole — Indul- 
gence should be destroyed . . . . -75 

CHAPTER VII. 

A WORKING MAN'S PARLIAMENT. 

Why Justice is blind — British Elections — Too much Talk— Right 
will conquer — Advice of Mr. Ruskin — Nobility of Labour — De- 
light in Work — Future of England — The Rights of Man — Few 
real Wants — Money and its Worth . . . -89 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



GOOD OUT OF EVIL. 



Voltaire — Mandeville's ' Fable of the Bees ' — The Lisbon Earth- 
quake — Poisonous Remedies — Voltaire's Head and Heart — 
Accidents not all Evil — Fate and Jupiter— Isaac Barrow — None 
without Trials ..... PAGE 103 



CHAPTER IX. 

ON CONFIDENCES AND SECRETS. 

Secrets illusive — Midas has Ears ! — Public Confessors — Plutarch's 
Morals — The Athenian Mercury — Confession — The common 
Character of Sin . . . . . • IX 7 



CHAPTER X. 

OF THE USE OF WORDS. 

Modern Fun — Quiet Writers — The Use of Superlatives — Quintilian 
— Cobbett — Simplicity — Comparison — Comic Singers — Unreality 
of the Stage — Bombast to be avoided . . . 131 

CHAPTER XL 

AWKWARDNESS. 

English Artists and Art— Chic— Lord Chesterfield— The English 
accused of Want of Geist — Mr. Arnold — Art in Silver — Gerome 
— Meissonnier — English Landscape — Want of London Manage- 
ment ..'..... 142 



xii CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XII. 

SATIRE. ITS USE AND ABUSE. 

A Great Want— Truth a Libel— Vulgar Satirists — The Bon Ton- 
Swift — Hogarth — Modern Satire — Thackeray . page 149 



CHAPTER XIII. 

ON THE CULTIVATION OF VIRTUE. 

Good to be grown — Examination — Cram — Modern Schoolboys — 
Blunderers — Diplomacy — Successful Roguery — The True 
Hero . . . . . . .161 



CHAPTER XIV. 

BRITISH PHILISTINISM. 

A New Word — Philistia of Old — Milton's Samson — A shade more 
Soul — The Barbarians — The People — Mr. Carlyle and the No- 
bility — Trade — The World's Ideals . . .176 



CHAPTER XV. 

ILL-NATURED PHILOSOPHY. 

Cynics — Timon — Modern Imitators — Young Cynics— Sneering — 
Carlyle and Thackeray — True Love — Falseness of Cynicism — 
Byron ....... 189 



CONTENTS. xiii 

CHAPTER XVI. 

TOO-GOOD PEOPLE. 

Saints — The Apostles not Saints in a modern sense — Hood's Lines 
— The Religiosus — Narrowing Forms — Cowper — Confucius — 
Buddha — Stylites — Self-sacrifice . . . page 203 



CHAPTER XVII. 

LITTLE TRIALS. 

Small Trials — Tom Brown on Prosperity — Man really Dust — Eliza- 
bethan Satirists — The Grand Style — Easy Trials — The Small Ones 
that wear us out . . . . . .217 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

OF HARD WORK. 

County Families — Pride — A Warrior Class — Dignity of Labour — 
Non-workers unhappy — The Curse a Blessing — The Brave Man 
— The Blessings of Work . . . . . 229 



CHAPTER XIX. 

AN EMPTY REWARD. 

A Last Infirmity — Different Estimates — Washington — Elizabeth — 
Raleigh's History — Fame merely Report — Its Emptiness —What 
True Fame should be .... 243 



xiv CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XX. 

SELF-GODLINESS. 

A Deep Sermon — The Habitations of Mammon — Seeking Salva- 
tion — Theatrical Godliness — Pharisees — Eggs not to be laid on 
the Sabbath — Selfishness of the Faith of some People — Humi- 
lity . . ... . . . PAGE 257 

CHAPTER XXI. 

FLATTERY AND PLAIN SPEAKING. 

A Courtier's Truth — Shade — Love Me, Love My Dog — Alcibiades 
— Raleigh's Remains — The Worth of Traitors — Flattery — A Pre- 
vailing Weakness — Whole Nations Misled^Peppering the People 
— Judicious Praise ...... 269 

CHAPTER XXII. 

PEACE AND WAR. 

The Cost of a Conqueror — Life sometimes well lost — London 
Dangers — Firemen — Conquest a Fertilising Influence — Deaths 
along the Coast — London Mortality — The Sword by Gold — 
Worse than War — England at War — The Cankers of Peace 283 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

FAITH IN MAN. 

Trust — Public Confidence — Religion — Society — Sweet Simplicity 
— Little Actions — Anxiety — Distrust — Broken Friendships — A 
Boy's Confidence — Credulity — True Faith — Misery of Doubt 295 



CONTENTS. xv 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE GOOD NEWS. 

Clergymen — Dreadful Assurances— Terrifying Words — Too Late — ■ 
Books of Punishments — The Cross — Agony — The Holy Office 
— The Question — Wordsworth — -Suggestions — A Glad Philo- 
sophy — Coleridge — A Death-Bed — The Miserere and Gloria 
Patri . .... page 307 




Errata. 

Page 40, for is it not, read it is not. 
,, 41, ,, sticking, ,, striking. 
,, 92, ,, pronounced ,, pronounces. 

For other and no doubt far graver errors the Aid/tor's severe and 
long illness, during the passage of this book through the press, must 
plead some excuse. 



CHAPTER I. 
INTRODUCTION— EGOTISM. 







CHAPTER I. 

The Central Vowel and First Numeral — Egotism — Its Uni- 
versality — Belief in Self — Egotism of Great Men — Birth — 
Punishment of Self Pride — Difficulty in believing that we are 
Obnoxious or Hateful — Self Examination. 

BEGIN my book with it ; it is the first letter 
and the first word, and, with some unhappy- 
men, the only thought through life. 

But in reading, it changes its person, 
and transfers itself from me to you. 

I talk about it, though yet upon the threshold of this 
book, because a wise friend objected to the title that * A 
Man's Thoughts ' was somewhat egotistical. Why so 
it is doubtful ; since an author, small though he may be, 
is at least a man, and as for egotism he shows no more — 
orneeds to showno more — in the projection of his thoughts 
upon the public than a painter, an actor, or a preacher. 
These, too, seek to instruct, or influence, or amuse the 

B 2 



4 A MAN'S THOUGHTS, 

world ; some few even dream of reforming it, by throwing 
their thoughts into the seething mass of opinion — ' casting 
their bread upon the waters,' to use a misapplied and 
sacred symbol, ajid hoping that after many days it may 
return to them. 

An author may, perhaps, in these days, be excused 
for hoping in that way, His egotism is the least selfish, 
since his returns, in a worldly point of view, are nearly 
the least of all. And indeed my friend's suggestion 
turned, in my particular case, my intention ' the seamy 
side without/ for, by the title of this book, I desired to 
get as far away from personal vanity and conceit as one 
well could. And after all it is not much to claim to be 
a Man ; at any rate that depends upon the estimate one 
places upon the privilege of being the far-off-descended 
creature modern naturalists make him out to be, My 
intention, then, was merely to give a name to certain 
thoughts and opinions here put forward. That I have 
not placed upon my own any peculiar value will be seen 
from the trouble I have taken to strengthen every propo- 
sition by citations from better writers and from nobler 
minds. If in this my purpose is mistaken for pedantry I 
shall be grieved but not surprised. 

We cannot escape this egotism ; it follows us through 
life ; the prayer of the humble Publican is as close to it 
as that of the proud Pharisee ; we drive self away with 
earnest entreaties and humble prayers, with good reso- 






'THE EGOISTS. 5 

lutions and manly endeavour, but it fits too closely to us. 
It is born with us, it exists with us — and some, vainly let 
us hope, say that it does not die with us but will rise 
again. 

What we call egotism, the French, who have formed 
their noun somewhat more closely than we, term 'ego'isme; 
and speaking of an adept in this passion, of which their 
nation furnishes brilliant examples, say, ' dont je connais- 
sais V ego'isme renforce — of whose thorough selfishness I 
was aware.' You see hereby that a whole nation places 
to the account of egotism a passionate love and admira- 
tion of self. It may not be always selfishness ; it has 
even been reduced to a philosophical opinion. ' Des- 
cartes,' says Reid, in his ' Essays on the Human Mind, 
was uncertain of everything but his own existence, and 
the existence and operations and ideas of his own mind. 
Some of his disciples remained, it is said, at this stage of 
his system, and got the name of egoists.' 

Another author tells us that the gentlemen of Port 
Royal banished from their method of speaking any 
reference to the first person, and called anyone who 
spoke that way an egotist. Editors are obliged to follow 
this rule, and to banish the eternal reference to their own 
opinions ; for egotism, if pleasing to oneself, is always 
distasteful to others. The leader-writers of the news- 
papers therefore say • we,' instead of ' I ; ' and certainly 
that method of speaking to the public seems to be best 



6 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

suited to the English and Americans, two nations of 
egotists. We are of opinion that the Ministry has 
signally failed, is more condemnatory and weighty than 
the simple /, because it is less egotistic. One way of 
depriving newspapers of their weight and force would be 
to make the writers drop the anonymous and sign their 
names. Actually an opinion is an opinion, and worth 
what it is worth, whether it be of A or of B. Really the 
opinion of the same writer in the ' Daily Universe ' will 
cause more stir than the same theory put forward in the 
' Morning World ; ' for office clings to a man and adorns 
him. You combat the unfledged opinions of Brown at 
your dinner-table, and yet his crude opinion clothed in 
weighty words will ' damn ' a delicate author. When 
Brown is thoroughly known, and the blind taken away 
from the window, his naked egotism is seen, and the 
world regards him not. 

It was not without reason that the Oracles inhabited 
the darkest recesses of the Temple, and that in the olden 
Mythology the voice issued from the fissures of the rock 
or from behind the veil. 

A certain amount of egotism, that is, belief in self, is 
natural to all men. It has been said that every man 
thinks he can poke the fire better than any other man. 
In shooting, fishing, novel-writing, riding, many men 
believe they can surpass others ; and although women, 
from their greater subjection to society, are less offensive 
in their egotism, it is said they are as bad. We must do 



BELIEF IN SELF. 7 

them this justice, that they conceal it better ; and we 
cannot doubt that they must be often punished by hearing 
men talk of nothing but themselves : how / am going to 
plough the ten acre lot and sow it with red wheat ; and 1 
shall go shooting, and / shall have my bay mare clipped, 
together with a thousand instances of my cigars, my port, 
my claret, my tandem, my books, and my tailor, or the 
fellow who ' built ' my hunting coat. People of fair 
position and education talk like this ; of course they will 
indignantly deny it when put thus plainly ; but let any- 
one ask the ladies. Let them ask what barristers talk 
about, what university men, club men, authors or artists 
talk about. It is little else but an experience of self; 
' each thinks his little set mankind.' Everybody believes 
in his own circle, his friends, his native village, his school, 
his college ; and the centre of that circle is self. 

It is so hard to go out of the centre ; we play at puss 
in the corner with ourselves, and keep to the corner as 
long as we can ; and some people, sublime egotists, are 
virtuous because it is comfortable, and religious because 
thereby they please the world ; and by pleasing the 
world they of course please themselves. 

Happily this self-opinion is not an unmixed evil. It 
may have caused half the troubles in the world ; but it 
has certainly caused half the triumphs and more than 
half the comforts and inventions. Unless Nelson had 
believed in himself, we should not have been where we 
are now. Unless Brindley had believed in his one im- 



8 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

portant scheme, and had thought that ' God Almighty 
made rivers to feed navigable canals,' we should not have 
had the water-transit; and unless Watt and others had 
believed in their own merits and inventions, our land- 
transit would now have been pretty much as it was a 
century ago. What belief in self must not Doctor Living- 
stone, Captains Grant and Burton, Sir Samuel Baker, and 
other travellers have, who go alone into a continent of 
savages — alone, and to conquer all difficulties, discover 
and open up new lands ? We can see this egotism plainly 
enough in Bruce, the great Abyssinian traveller : he was 
perpetually full of himself and what he had done. We 
may reasonably suppose it in the others — no doubt 'toned 
down ' by courtesy, religion, or philosophy ; but there it 
is. How thoroughly every satirist must have it ! Let 
us look at Juvenal condemning all Rome ; Horace sati- 
rising all the weaker poets ; Persius abusing Bavius and 
the whole Roman world, nay, mankind — 

When I look round on Man, and find how vain 
His passions — 

as if he were not a man himself! Can there be anything 
more pitiable than the picture which Pope gives of him- 
self as persecuted by everybody, followed by poets who 
begged his help — 

No place is sacred ; not the church is free : 
E'en Sunday shines no Sabbath Day to me. 
Then from the Mint walks forth the man of rhyme, 
Happy to catch me — just at dinner-time : 



ACTORS, ARTISTS, AND AUTHORS. 9 

— and the measure he dealt out to obscure scribblers in 
the Dunciad? How could he write those lines in the 
Universal Prayer — ' that mercy I to others show, that 
mercy show to me,' when half his life had been spent in 
mercilessly cutting and wounding others ? 

All painters have much self-love : their imagination is 
great, their reflection little; their success easily per- 
ceived, and brilliant. All actors are of course immense 
egotists. How else could they strut in kingly parts, and 
believe themselves fit representatives of Hamlet, Ccesar, 
Brutus, and King Cambyses? As the vanity of Sir 
Godfrey Kneller, in an anecdote, throws a light upon his 
class, so does one of Cooke, the actor, illuminate his 
own. Kneller said to a sitter, ' Flatter me, my dear sir ; 
I paint better when you flatter me ; ' and Pope, who says 
he never before saw such vanity, tells us that when Sir 
Godfrey lay dying, he spent his time contemplating his 
own monument, and had a dream, in which he saw St. 
Luke in Heaven, who welcomed him there, crying, ' Are 
you the famous Sir Godfrey Kneller from England ? ' and 
then embraced him, and paid him [ many pretty compli- 
ments,' said Sir Godfrey, 'on the art we both had followed 
while iti this world? Can egotism go further ? It would 
seem impossible ; yet that exclamation of Farinelli's the 
musician, exceeds it. ' What a divine air ! ' said an ad- 
mirer to him, when he ceased playing. ' Yes,' said the 
Italian, as he laid down his violin, 'one God, one 



io A MANS THOUGH! S. 

Farinelli ! ' After this, Cooke's vanity is small and 
dwarfed. He and a great actor had been arranging a 
season together, and had divided the even or equal parts, 
such as Brutus and Cassius • when it came, however, 
to ' Richard III./ Cooke broke off the engagement by 
crying, ' What ! I, George Frederick Cooke, play Rich- 
mond to your Richard ! I'll ' We need not finish 

the sentence. 

Doubtless this intense egotism, as it is found with all 
artists, is necessary to the artistic nature. Without it 
they would sink in the midst of their disappointments 
and trials. Nor can a poet or an author attempt to 
teach the world without a full belief in that which he 
teaches, and in himself as a teacher. What is so dis- 
tasteful to us all, is the egotism of a man who has really 
done nothing in the world, who is as mean in his ap- 
pearance as he is mediocre in his talents, and who will 
yet presume upon his twopenny position to dictate to 
others ; nay will often prove not only an enemy to merit, 
but an obstructive to all true teaching and improvement. 
The vainest of these men have generally the least to 
recommend them ; and because they own nothing, are 
proud of that nothing. They doat upon themselves, and 
pet themselves, and treat themselves in the inverse ratio 
of their merits, with an intense self-respect ; whereas it 
is ordinarily found that the really meritorious man is dis- 
tinguished by a retiring modesty. 



PRIDE OF BIRTH. n 

If one of these men happens to be born of a house 
noble, or supposed to be noble, he will treat men of 
merit, who are simply but later parallels of his good 
ancestors, with contempt as new men. If, on the con- 
trary, he is a new man himself, he will take pride in his 
riches, and 'shove aside the worthy bidden guest.' 
These men, like those who beat the walls in madhouses, 
are a sufficient punishment to themselves ; but what we 
want is a society that can correct them. Our education 
is not finished when we leave school, and our whippings 
should not end there. For this end satire has been re- 
sorted to ; but in the public press and society in general 
there is a great want of that wholesome ingredient. Men 
snigger at but they do not scorn a foolish rich man now- 
a-days ; they sneer at him behind his back and dine with 
him next day; whereas, in the days of Elizabeth, when 
the drama was a power, they showed him up on the stage, 
hat, feather, trunk hose, and sword, and pointed the 
moral thus : — 

How purblind is the world that such a monster, 
In a few dirty acres swaddled, should 
Be mounted in opinion's empty scale, 
Above the reach of virtues which adorn 
Souls that make worth their centre, and to that 
Draw all their lines of action ! 

We don't want now-a-days a freedom like that of the Greek 
comedians ; but we do want a pungent and pure satire to 



12 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

laugh at folly, and to extinguish and cover with ridicule 
successful vice. 

Egotism is of course, when it is a vice, accompanied 
with its peculiar punishment. The man who is a vulgar 
egotist, and obtrudes his misfortunes or experiences on 
others, instead of wisely bearing them himself silent, y 
and strongly, relieves his sorrows by giving tongue to 
them, but is generally set down as a bore. ' It is a hard 
and nice subject for a man to speak of himself : it grates 
his own heart to say anything of disparagement, and the 
listener's ears to hear anything in praise from him.' This 
is Cowley's dictum, and a very true one. We are all so 
selfish, that we suspect self-praise, and think it to be no 
recommendation. Moreover, an egotist of this sort will 
often relate the most absurd stories of himself rather than 
be silent. Hence he blunders on, filling his hearers with 
disgust, and himself reaping the mere tickling pleasure of 
hearing his own feats chronicled by his own tongue. 
People who are ill, and who have suffered misfortune, are 
subject to this complaint. Poor women who gossip in 
the street can always be overheard saying something 
about themselves or their own misfortunes. ' So I goes 
to Mrs. Jenkins merely to beg the loan of a few coals, 

and ' ; and then the story begins, the listener only 

awaiting her turn to pour her little chronicle of self into 
her neighbour's ears. They are all like two authors, who, 



EMPTINESS OF FAME. 13 

not being rivals of each other, can afford to bepraise 
each other's works. 

The Scotch have a proverb, ' you scratch me, and I'll 
tickle thee ; ' and so two or three egotists, by a natural 
adhesion, seem to stick to one another, as certain cunning 
old horses and cows will stand head and tail under a tree 
to flap away the flies. 

This passion of the mind takes some very curious forms, 
and when indulged in, leads to madness, certainly often 
to guilt. Can calm and quiet people, who know how 
empty fame is, understand those who will commit a crime 
to be talked about, or who will peril their lives in a dan- 
gerous performance, because it pleases their egotism that 
others should stare at them ? Can we comprehend the 
twisted brain of the madman who, being born a grocer or 
some obscure craftsman, goes mad on pride, and believes 
himself a king, and that the very keepers bow down to 
him ? Can we but wonder at the washer-woman, who, in 
spite of rebuffs, trouble, non-payment of her due, and the 
hard work of every day, is yet as self-opinioned, ay, and 
more so, than the grandest duchess in the universe ? If 
we probe men of the world, men of probity, men of po- 
sition, and great givers of charity, we shall often find self 
at the bottom of all. Self goes with us to bed ; it rises 
with us in the morning ; we carry it to our counting 
houses ; the priest puts it on with his vestments ; it kneels 
with the layman at his prayers, 



14 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

This obtrusion of self takes place at a very early age, 
no one shall say at how early an age. That intense intro- 
visionist, Jean Paul Richter, tells us, among the many 
valuable things he lets us know, that one afternoon, when 
a 'very young child,' he witnessed the birth of Self 
Consciousness. ' I was standing in the outer door, and 
looking leftward at the stack of the fuel-wood, when, all 
at once, the internal vision "I am a Me {ich bin ein Ich)" 
came like a flash of heaven before me, and in gleaming 
light ever afterwards continued ; then had my Me, for 
the first time, seen itself, and for ever. Deceptions of 
memory are scarcely conceivable here, in regard to an 
event occurring altogether within the veiled Holy-of- 
Holies of man.' And what a me did Jean Paul awake 
to ! and to such, as valuable, if not as brilliant, in genius, 
more valuable to us-ward everyone awakes. Here, in 
poverty and trial — which a ' comfortable ' Englishman 
cannot realise, which is too like starvation for a work- 
house child in England to experience — this Prince of 
Thinkers first welcomed his Me. Here Egotism was a 
psalm of joy. And why not? There is no crying over 
a frozen and miserable youth in Jean Paul. ' On the 
whole,' says his biographer, ' it is not by money, or 
money's worth, that man lives and has his being. Is not 
God's universe within our heads, whether there be a torn 
skull-cap or a king's diadem without. Let no one ima- 
gine that Paul's young years were unhappy ; still less that 



self-examination, 15 

he looks back on them in a lachrymose, sentimental 
manner, with the smallest symptom either of boasting or 
whining.' 

Yet, universal as it is, we are not wise unless we con- 
quer it. We must go out of self to judge self, or we shall 
be ever bewitched by toys and gewgaws, and made blind 
in our own despite. When Maria, in the 'Twelfth 
Night' of Shakspeare, wishes to punish Malwlio, she gets 
on his blind side by his egotism. And yet there can be 
little doubt that Malvolio is a very wise and capable man 
when his egotism is laid aside ; but with it he is ' an af- 
fection'd (affected) ass, that cons state without book, and 
utters it by great swarths ; the best persuaded of hinu^ 
so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his 
ground of faith, that all that look on him love him ; and on 
that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to 
work.' 

We laugh at the comedy, but are ourselves guilty of the 
motive which is its groundwork. Many of us being 
young, still think, after many rebuffs, that we are pleasant 
fellows, and are pretty sure to be welcomed in any com- 
pany. There is not a man of us but believes in his heart 
of hearts that he could win the affections of the best, 
prettiest, and finest girl in the world, if he had fair chance 
and time to propose to her. Tell B that A has really a 
natural antipathy to him, and thinks him odious ; and he 
says, ' Hate me ! Come, hang it, now, that is too absurd.' 



1 6 A MAN'S THOUGHTS 

Every man believes in his personal influence. The busi- 
ness can never go on without him. The boys that are to 
succeed him will overthrow all that he has built up ; ' the 
mice will play when the cat's away ; ' there will be quite 
a hole in the world when he falls through. But time 
should gently wean us of all that : it should teach us the 
best lesson, and the last — to distrust ourselves, to know 
our own weaknesses, to be generous to the weaknesses of 
others, and to praise and acknowledge their goodness and 
wisdom. The whole task of life is to conquer self; the 
whole wisdom is to know self. Finally, self-abasement 
and self-judgment are so highly rated, that the remission 
of all other judgment is awarded^ to them by St. Paul. 
' Let a man examine himself,' he writes; ' for if we would 
judge ourselves, we should not be judged.' It may be 
that the last Great Judgment of all will be that made pos- 
sible by true light and knowledge, and will be passed with 
regard to ourselves upon ourselves. 







CHAPTER II. 
THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 




CHAPTER IT. 

tr I r — Self and its Importance — Conscience, 

T is the chief concern of each and of all of 
us. With that personal pronoun for a title, 
there is no knowing what the subject of an 
essay may be ; it may be upon egotism, 
selfishness, idiosyncrasy, the journal in which the article 
appears, or upon the peculiarities of man or men. Hart- 
ley Coleridge would have written the sweetest and most 
heart-piercing of verses upon it ; and Hazlitt would have 
given us a rare discourse respecting his own inner fee'- 
ings upon personal peculiarities ; Montaigne would have 
urged that he did not like roast pork, nor to say prayers 
standing, or would have told a ridiculous story about the 
strength of his father's thumbs. These might very well 
come in as concerning ' I„ ; What we at present are 
about to do is to write about the conscience, that king- 
dom within our kingdom, the inner spiritual force, 
c 2 



2o A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Now upon the conscience much has been written — a 
great deal more than has been thought thoroughly out ; 
and lately, Professor Maurice, of Cambridge, has, in a lec- 
ture, emitted a sentence which has given us our key-note. 
He strikes at once upon the fact that there are individual 
existences ; that man is actually above the animals, not 
only by Darwin and Huxley's natural selection, but by 
an inner something. Here is his startling question : — 

c Does the word I seem to you an unpractical word, one 
which only concerns shadows ? You do not act as if this 
were so. You do not speak as if this were so. You are 
rather angry if reverence is withdrawn from the word. 
In making your calculations about the doings of other 
men or of your own, is it not your maxim thaf this / is 
entitled to a primary consideration ? ' 

And then he shows — we have printed the above sen- 
tence separately, so that you may read its simple words 
over again — that the moralist takes hold of ' I,' and that, 
having established the fact that there is an ' 1/ a fact we 
all of us act upon, an internal business of mental action 
and of responsibility is established, and that ' 1 ' has a 
conscience, that it is, as Jean Paul proves, something 
which exists within, which is pleased, satisfied, wounded, 
excited, or deadened. 

Now nobody will dispute that there is an 'I;' even 
very modest persons find that out, although late in life. 
When a boy, with a sad home and a severe father, who, 



l P AN INNER FORCE. 21 

as most fathers do, probably with an idea that it is the 
right thing to do, snubbed his children severely, a writer 
remembers now the pleasurable feeling with which the 
conscious ' I ' reasserted itself. A dispute occurring, a 
very timid remark from the boy settled it ; and, much 
applauded, the thought burst upon him, l And so I am 
not a blockhead after alL' So the Italian artist asserted 
his personality by the exclamation, ' And I, too, am a 
painter I ' 

It is astonishing how the ' I ' can be crushed out of a 
person. There are some nations and peoples to whom 
others have been so cruel, that the whole notion of a 
distinctive existence seems to have died away from them; 
and then comes the most cruel part of all history : their 
very humiliation and subjection are pleaded as a cause 
and excuse for further tyranny. But we cannot pursue 
that part of the subject further, however interesting, save 
to say that the ' I,' which is so crushed out of a people 
that it will hug its fetters, and rejoice in its humiliation, 
can be banished by sin from a man's heart, so that he 
shall rejoice in being vicious and cruel ; and this may 
happen to him very early in life. We remember at school 
having heard a big lubberly blackguard of a boy say, 
with some kind of remorse, ' Why, I have not made any 
of the little beggars cry to-day ! ' He was the bully of 
the schooL So Tiberius Caesar is said to have regretted 
that the whole world had not but one neck, so that by 



22 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

a stroke he could sever it. He was the bully of the 
world.. In both these cases the conscience had become 
thoroughly warped, seared, and misled ; so that, instead 
of being a guide fit to be trusted, it became a misleader. 
and, indeed, led its owner into destruction rather than 
salvation. 

But, after all, what is the conscience? some reader 
may ask > and the question in this material age is not an 
unnatural one. Some may deny that it exists at all ; 
others may assert that it is so much modified by educa- 
tion and civilization, that it may almost be said to be a 
mere product of the latter. Some even assert that it is 
the result of Christianity and of Christian teaching ; and 
others, again, laugh at it as a thing easily dispensed with, 
and sent to sleep if it makes us uncomfortable. It will 
be well to answer these objections, and to state what 
Conscience really is. It is a power given us whereby we 
may judge our own actions, and by which each man may 
condemn or acquit himself immediately, or shortly after, 
an action on his part has taken place. Some persons 
define it as the faculty by which we distinguish what is 
right from what is wrong. Gessner says that it may be 
derived from con, together wkh, and scire, to know ; so that 
you at once know what you have done. Others piut it as 
derived from scientia communis y the common or general 
in-dwelling knowledge of man. Chaucer uses the word 
so as> to- mean a soft and sweet feeling. Speaking of the 



CONSCIENCE. 23 

Prioresse in his Prologue, he says that she felt the loss 
even of her dogs : — 

But sore wept she if on of hem were dede, 
Or if men smote it with a yerde smert ; 
And all was conscience and tendre herte. 

Can anything be prettier than this picture of sweet in- 
ward feeling ? In Fabian we find the history of Cordelia, 
on which Shakspeare founded his ' Lear,' and Cordelia 
appealing to her father thus : ' Most reverend fader, 
whereas my ii susters have dissynylyd with the, but I 
may not speke to the otherwyse then my Conscyence 
ledyth me.' ' Conscience,' says Dr. South, * is a Latin 
word, although with an English termination, and, accord- 
ing to the very notation of it, imports a double or joint 
knowledge, — to wit, one of a Divine law or rule, the 
other of a man's own action; and so is properly the 
application of a general law to a particular instance of 
practice.' Lastly, we may cite Sharp's 'Sermons': — 'Con- 
science, taken in general, is nothing less than a man's 
judgment or persuasion concerning moral good or evil, 
or concerning what he ought to do, or what he ought not 
to do, and what he lawfully may do.' Bishop Jeremy 
Taylor ought, indeed, to be an authority on the * Con- 
science,' for we have before us his celebrated folio, 
1 Ductor Dubitantium, or the Rule of Conscience in all 
her General Measures ' ; and therein he debates hundreds 
of ' cases of conscience,' — cases, by the way, which we 



24 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

should think ought, for the most part, never to be debated. 
Indeed, when a man too easily makes a question of what 
he should do, we may depend that, conscientiously, he 
ought not to do it. When a man begins to ask himself 
whether he should take another potato, another slice of 
meat, or another glass of grog, we may depend upon it 
that he has no need of the indulgence. People who 
indulge in these questions are rightly called ' casuists ' ; 
they put the case or cases (casus), and debate whether a 
thing be right or wrong ; and with us the casuist has a 
very bad name, almost as bad as a Jesuit. But this 
should hardly be. A disciple of the society called by 
the holy name of Jesus should be a good man ; one 
whose conscience is so tender that he debates every little 
point about his actions, should be good too. But the 
world, especially the Protestant world, has found out, 
with a rough-and-tumble logic, and a ready reason, that 
these people who are always debating what is right and 
what is wrong are the very people to go wrong. So also 
even Catholic sovereigns, and the Popes themselves, have 
found that the Jesuits are not wholly worthy of the 
blessed name that they have assumed. 

The truth is, if we begin to quarrel and to debate with 
our conscience, we are sure to be in the wrong. ' God,' 
says Jeremy Taylor, ' has given us Conscience, to be in 
God's stead to us ; to give us laws, and to exact obedience 
to those laws ; to punish them that prevaricate, and to 



A SOLUTION. 25 

reward the obedient. Therefore Conscience is called 
the Household Guardian, the Domestick God, the Spirit 
or Angel of the Place ; and when we call God to witness, 
we only mean that our Conscience is right, and thai God 
and God's vicar, our conscience, know it.' Here, then, is 
the solution of the whole difficulty of priesthood ; here is 
the final appeal ; here is the proof of the eternal truth 
delivered by our Lord, ' The kingdom of God is within 
you.' You and I, the universal I, all of us, have within 
us a domestic God or Judge. He knows whether we do 
right or wrong ; he is always with us. I cannot escape 
him ; I carry him with me wherever I go, because it is 
' I.' Finally, a modern poet tells us that we take this 
vicar of God with us into judgment, and that it alone 
condemns us. He gives a fearful picture of a guilty one 
before God at the last day : — 

He cannot plead, his throat is choked, 

Sin holds him in her might ; 
And, self-condemn'd, he slideth down 

To an eternal night ! 

The ranged angels, great white throne, 

The whole Almighty quire, 
Fade out ; the Father's sapphire gaze 

Grows molten in its ire. 

It is quite possible that this visionary picture is a true 
one, and that the condemnation which the wicked will 
undergo may be self-pronounced. 



26 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

In Hebrew there is no proper word for Conscience, 
the heart signifying the same thing ; as, ' oft-times thine 
own heart knoweth.' St. Paul refers us to it as to an 
infallible guide : they who use the testimony of con- 
science ' have the law written in their hearts ' ; and St. 
John, divinely inspired, cries out, ' If our conscience 
condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.' 
And why is this ? A holy father shall answer you with 
an irrefragable truth : ' Because,' says Origen, ' no man 
knows the things of a man but the spirit of a man that is 
within him ; and that is the spirit of our conscience.' 
Happily, too, not only do Christian writers, but heathens, 
' benighted heathens,' as we ignorantly call them, appeal 
to this. Socrates was guided, he tells us, by an inner 
light — his Daemon, or small and special god — his con- 
science, which told him what to do and when he did 
wrong ; and he, perceiving this, did not worship the gods 
with external show so much as others did, but sought 
chiefly to obey the lead of this guide, which he did not 
hesitate to say he always found right. Even when in 
prison, escaping which he might have avoided a shameful 
death, this greatest of all heathens remained true to the 
inner guide, and waited for its promptings. As they came 
not, he prepared to die. He did not reproach his judges : 
' You,' he said, ' go on your ways, having unjustly con- 
demned me ; I go to a prison, thence to die ; but which 
is best, God only knows.' Probably no death-bed can 



NOBLE HEATHENS. 27 

be cited — and there are many that are historical in then- 
interest — that is so full of calm philosophic courage, and 
of the workings of conscience, as this of Socrates. 

Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are two other brilliant 
examples of men who were not Christians, and who yet 
constantly referred to an in-dwelling spirit — to the con- 
science, in fact. You will find Marcus Aurelius, in his 
meditations, continually solacing himself with such a 
thought as ' Well, the world troubles me very much ; 
there are a thousand hindrances to live a happy life ; life 
itself is too short to be certain. No matter, we have in 
us a guide and rule, which will always tell us whether we 
be right or wrong. Let us satisfy that, and we shall be 
happy.' Cicero also speaks of having a conscious inner 
feeling, and being guided by it. Our latest writer on 
this subject leads us irresistibly to the conclusion that we 
have a conscience, and to a safer conclusion than ever 
Roman Catholic casuist could arrive at, namely, that the 
conscience does not need a priestly or tyrannical guide. 
1 It asks for laws, not rules ; for freedom, not chains ; for 
education, not suppression.' In fact, the conscience 
being ' I,' needs a fatherly love to bring it into the full 
light, not to be frightened by bugbears, nor to be tied 
down by false laws and foolish restrictions. 

Many amusing instances might be given of the curious 
rules which men have set up for the governance of Con 
science. Much as we venerate Bishop Taylor, one can 



28 A MAN'S THOUGHTS, 

hardly look with entire satisfaction on his great book. 
In fact, there is not much to be said upon the subject. 
If you think that any action is wrong, you may rely that 
it is so. One hardly needs to put a case for this, 
although of course one can imagine many in which an 
innocent action would be guilty, or a guilty action 
innocent. That may apply to the action, but not 
to the actor. Thus A, who is a married man, saw a 
beautiful young lady, veiled, and in the dusk ; he im- 
mediately paid court to her and kissed her, not knowing 
it was his own wife. Of course A is guilty here, although 
in fact he is innocent : he does no harm to any one ; he 
only debases himself. This simple consideration will 
put an end to the delusive opinion of many untaught 
people ; amongst others, of Burns, the poet, who says, 
somewhere in his letters, that the consequence of an 
action makes its guilt. If B does not harm anybody 
by his thefts, his follies, his incontinency, and other 
sins, B is to be held guiltless. Such is Burns' theory. 
The fact is, B is still guilty. We bring him before a 
superior Court. Within his heart sits a Judge, the 
Vicar of the Great Spirit. He alone can accuse or 
excuse. 

One rule in Taylor's great book is very sound, and 
that is, that 'all consciences are to walk by the same 
rule, and that which is just to one is so to all in the like 
circumstances. This makes it,' says the bishop, * that 



THE DUCTOR DUBITANTIUM. 29 

two men may be damned for doing two contradictions : 
as a Jew may perish for not keeping of his Sabbath, 
and a Christian for keeping it ; a thorough iconoclast 
for breaking images, and another for worshipping them ; 
for eating, and for not eating ; for coming to church, or 
for staying at home.' You see all is referred to the one 
judge. Taylor gives many amusing instances. We will 
cite one, and then leave a most interesting subject to the 
reader's consideration. 'Autolycus robbed the gardens 
of Trebonius, a private citizen, who forgave him. Then 
Trebonius was chosen consul, and Autolycus robbed 
him again ; Trebonius thereon condemned him to the 
gallows, because he could forgive an injury done to him- 
self, but not one done to the State : she only could 
forgive that.' It is only the other day that the same rule 
obtained. A policeman, acting under Commissioner 
Mayne's too sweeping and cruel order, seized a gentle- 
man's dog ; the owner gave the policeman a thrashing, 
and the magistrate said he was right, because being a 
plain-clothes man (vulgarly called a detective) the gentle- 
man had a right to suppose that he was a thief. Had, 
however, the man been covered by the Queen's uniform, 
the gentleman would have been severely punished. 
Lastly, we have all heard of the phrase, ' When you are 
at Rome do as Rome does.' Here is an instance and a 
reason. ' He that fasted in Ionia and Smyrna,' says 
Taylor, ' upon a Saturday was a schismatic ; and so was 



3 o A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

he who did not fast upon that day at Milan and Rome, 
both upon the same reason. 

' Cum fueris Romse, Romano vivito more ; 
Cum fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi ; 

(" When at Rome live after the Roman manner ; when 
elsewhere, follow the custom which there prevails ; ") 
because he was to conform to the custom of Smyrna as 
well as Milan in their respective dioceses.' To conclude, 
it is useless to load the conscience with vain rules, to 
take oaths against eating meat or drinking wine, for 
where we do so we only lay a trap for ourselves to fall in ; 
but it is most useful to let conscience have free play, to 
consider what the end of life is, and why above us, yet in 
us, presides this mysterious judge, this secret spy which 
knows all our ' evil and corrupt affections ; ' and yet, 
blessed be God, knows our trials and our triumphs too. 










CHAPTER III. 
OF MANLY READINESS. 



CHAPTER III. 

Valour — The Workers in Life — The Norse- Man — Hamlet on 
Readiness — Procrastination — The Winning Moment — Making 
up ' Minds ' — Self-Help — Early Rising — Readiness. 




[ALOUR, which some will spell after the 
Roman fashion, ' Valor ' (obliterating that 
which delicately marks the transition state 
from that tongue, in which we received the 
word), signifies worth. Actually, it is value, which was 
once written ' valure,' and a valourous man was one who 
would win his way by worth and readiness, capacity, 
ability, boldness. A manly, ready man, first in war, first 
in love, and equal to the occasion, was the man to be 
esteemed. Not that fighting alone was ever to be solely 
commended. ' There could not produce enough come 
out of that ! ' says a quaint thinker. ' I suppose the right 
good fighter was oftenest also the right good forest feller 

D 



34 



A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 



— the right good improver, discemer, doer, and worker 
of every kind ; for the true valour, different enough from 
ferocity, is the basis of all : a more legitimate kind of 
valour, that showing itself against the untamed forests and 
dark brute powers of Nature, to conquer Nature for us/ 

Truly, then, a valiant man is the true man, if we read 
this rightly. He is, according to the sound heraldic 
motto of a noble family, i Ready, aye ready/ Whether 
to do or to die, it matters little to such a man, seeing that, 
in the battle of human life, each moment a valiant man 
goes forth, and lays down his life. 

And this he does without thinking, in an honest 
straightforward way, taking as his wages, for the most 
part, hard work and hard living, and looking straight 
into the future, without much hope of improvement. 
That is the case with most of us. On this little angle- 
land — this piece of earth rescued from the yeasty waves 
of the Atlantic and German Oceans, blown over by 
chilling winds from the north-east, and watered with 
warm showers from the south-west — on this fragment, 
split from the rest of Europe, and shaped much like a 
scraggy leg of mutton, with Scotland for a knuckle end,, 
there are, we will say, about nineteen millions of English 
men and women, and three millions of Scots ; and of 
these twenty-two millions, nineteen at least work from 
day to day without much promise of making a fortune, 
yet content to see others possess houses and lands,, 
horses and fine clothes. There may be a million of 



THE NORSE-MAN'S DEATH. 35 

well-to-do land, fund, and property holders, who ' live at 
home at ease,' and laugh at to-morrow ; but there are 
certainly not more : and nous autres are obliged to be up 
and doing, as busy as ants in their hill, bees in their hive, 
or a moving mass of mites in a cheese, tumbling over 
each other, and doing all in our power to do the best for 
ourselves. 

Now, just as much as a man drives out fear, marches 
boldly on, says his say, does his act, so much is he a 
valiant man. In the old Norse legends it was indis- 
pensable to be brave. Odin cast out of his heaven, the 
Valhalla, all who were tainted with cowardice ; and over 
a battle-field, the priests taught, went the Valkyrs, or 
choosers of the slain, heavenly messengers, or angels, 
who took care only to admit the valiant. The kings, 
when about to die, having missed, we will suppose, their 
right opportunity of getting properly knocked on the 
head in battle, lay down in a ship, which, with its sails 
set, drifted out into the ocean, charged with fire, too, in 
the hold, so that the king might blaze in his tomb, and 
be delivered to the sky and ocean, Others cut them- 
selves and marked their bodies with honourable wounds, 
so that Odin might, peradventure, be deceived, and take 
them in. So, too, they loved Thor as well as Odin ; and 
Uhland finds it a trait of ' right honest strength, that the 
old Norse heart finds its friend in the Thunder-God.' 

There is a great deal more in Shakspere's notion of 



$6 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

readiness, or a perpetual and ever-present spring of 
valour, than even in the Norse suggestions. To the 
philosophical Hamlet it is clear as light that a brave sub- 
mission to the decrees of Providence is to be accounted 
of equal value with righteousness itself. ' If it be now, 
'tis not to come,' he says of death ; ' if it be not to come, 
it will be now ; if it be not now, yet it will come : the 
readiness is all' 

It would be well if we all bore this grand truth in our 
minds. If we did, the craning of our necks after impos- 
sible altitudes, the straining of our consciences, and the 
bent of our minds would be done away with. ' Be ye 
ready, therefore,' is the constant injunction in the Bible. 
There is in all well-bred animals an ease, readiness, and 
cheerfulness in work that is superior to some men ; but 
those men are little better than fools. There are whole 
nations that have lain in the background, with regard to 
others, grumbling, fretting, worrying, and going back- 
wards, simply because they were never ready to face their 
true position. Whereas the Scots, with about as poor a 
land as they well could have, have by industry and valour 
kept their heads not only above water, but have placed 
themselves foremost in the world. Yet, what a small 
people it is, multiplying fast truly, sending out colonists, 
and fixing on a new Scotland, and settling themselves 
readily to work, fighting in the middle ages, filling the 
armies of France and Germany with the most trusted 



WORLD- WAITERS. 3 7 

guards, and ready in the present day to merge into 
gardeners or farmers. In one state they are as good as 
another — a shrewd, patient, hardy, brave nation ; a 
people seldom to be enough praised, seeing that we are 
plagued with others whom we have always to help, who 
cry against their landlords, their land, their Church, their 
climate, their position, and even against themselves ; who 
perpetually grumble, but do not get on. 

Readiness is not only manly, but generous. This, we 
have said before, in pointing out with what vigour well- 
bred horses work, and well-bred dogs hunt : ioxgenerosus, 
which we read as an equivalent to liberality, means sim- 
ply well-bred, of a good stock ; and the generous giver, 
the liberal man, is ever the ready man. It is lucky that 
it is so. There are so many hindrances, such coldness, 
deadness, and delay everywhere, that, if it were not for 
some forward and excellent spirits, the world would forget 
itself to marble, and little or nothing would be done ; for 
the unready, if not always close and mean, carry this kind 
of reflection about them, — they are fond of putting things 
off ; they find it convenient to wait; what they have to 
do will be done quite as well to-morrow, and so oil 

Such people no doubt have their use. They are the 
dead weight which keeps the coach steady, the ballast 
which trims the boat.; but, in another way, they are worse 
than useless : they are dangerous in the extreme. When 
Doctor Young wrote his poems there was a vile Latin 



3 8 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

style prevalent, which made him use long foreign Latinised 
words, instead of their equivalent in plain English. His 
words, with these long-tailed terminations, have been 
easily seized upon as very useful to pedantic writing- 
masters : thus the capital line, — 

Procrastination is the thief of time, 
has been repeated so often, that it has almost lost its 
meaning. Suppose anyone were to render the line in plain 
English, and say, ' Putting things off till to-morrow steals 
away our lives,' he would be thought to have said some- 
thing original. The-putter-ofT-till-to-morrow, the next-day- 
man, or the procrastinat&r, is truly an individual not at all 
to be trusted. He rises late, and is always behind time; 
yet he seems to imagine — only it is impossible that he 
should do so — that he can run a race against time, and 
overtake yesterday, so as to snatch back the two hours 
he lost doing nothing. John Gaspar Lavater, the 
great physiognomist, made a shrewd remark about such a 
one. He said of him that, having prorogued to-day's 
honesty till to-morrow, he would probably prorogue it till 
next day, and so on until eternity. So Macbeth, when 
thinking of the passage of time, cries out, in an agony of 
doubt and scorn,^ 

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 
To the last syllable of recorded time ; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death. 



THE WINNING MOMENT. 39 

Yes, truly ; and the majority of such fools are fools very 
like ourselves, who were not ready, A great general is, 
according to Napoleon, to be distinguished from an infe- 
rior one by always being a quarter of an hour beforehand. 
It is by that little quarter of an hour that the battles 
have ever been won. When once the mind is made up, 
the best way is to act at once. Promptitude, readiness, 
quickness, is, after all, as efficient as anything, and should 
always be urged as an essential to thorough efficiency. 
When once anything has been brought to a proper and 
a clearly defined shape, the best way is ' to go in and win.' 
If you wait, you will find reflection come upon you, and 
check your horse at the leap ; if you do the thing at once, 
you will succeed. A well-known newspaper projector and 
proprietor had an idea brought to him by a man who was 
not rich enough to bring the paper out himself. It is the 
rule of the world that almost all the discoverers and in- 
ventors have not sufficient capital to float their discoveries; 
and so it was with our poor projector, who urged his capital 
idea on the capitalist with all the determination he could. 
However, the man with the money required time to think 
and to feel the pulse of the public. Would the public 
care about a comic paper ? Would there be enough people 
to buy it ? Would there be enough comic talent to sup- 
port it ? All these questions took a long time to settle ; 
but at last the gentleman made up his mind that the notion 
was a capital one, and that he would embark in it He went 



4 o A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

therefore in a hurry along the Strand to Stationers' Hall 
to register the idea, and met a man carrying a placard, 
announcing the publication of ' Punch, ' a new comic 
serial, to be published every week ! That was the very 
publication which he wished to register ; but it had passed 
out of his hands for ever ! 

Rashness is of course not to be commended, but it is 
better than perpetual unreadiness. ' Men first make up 
their minds,' wrote Archbishop Whately (and the smaller 
the mind, the sooner it is made up), ' and then seek for 
the reasons.' The witticism is not a new one with the 
archbishop ; nor of course is it not wholly true. There 
is a class of mind considerably smaller than the readily 
made up mind, and that is the vacillating, shifty, trembling, 
hesitating mind, that is never made up at all. Decision of 
character and promptitude are always signs of greatness. 
It is the little fellow, the timid animal with a brain not so 
big as that of a hen pheasant, that goes fluttering about 
from one thing to another, and never decides for himself 
until he lets death decide for him; and then, as a modern 
writer has it, when the woodman's cry is heard, and we 
know that where the tree falls it must lie, a dreadful voice 
will thus shout in his ear, — 

The dead past life has pass'd, and no more 
Can you act the old foolishness o'er : 
You've your tally — 'tis ten and threescore. 



HELP YOURSELF. 41 

So take up the dark lamp, — come on : 
It don't matter : you now must be gone ; 
And the fool and his folly are one. 

We make the world we live in. If our young men 
could, instead of hoping for some one to help them, tho- 
roughly believe that, what an alteration world there be. 
It is the men who are reduced to ' first principles,' who 
begin with nothing, who are untrammelled by false hopes 
— begot by falser friends — who make their way. Were 
we to be as active here, and as ready to help ourselves as 
the colonists of South Australia and America are, does 
anyone suppose that we should have the mass of pauper- 
ism that eats into our charities, blots our civilisation, and 
hardens our hearts ? When you are learning to swim, 
the teacher who may have given you some necessary 
support, suddenly takes that away and bids you strike 
out. You would have timidly clung to that support long 
after it was needless, but for him. With a shrinking 
timidity, and almost horror, you obey the impulse of his 
voice, and strike out, and, oh what pleasure ! find that 
you can swim. So, again, half the defeats in life are 
occasioned by want of sticking out, by the disease of 
unreadiness, rather than by adverse circumstance, and 
more than half of the miserable regrets in life arise from 
the bitterly remembered moments which were wasted 
when so much might have been achieved. 



42 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

One very common result of want of readiness is ill- 
temper. This is not only produced upon others who 
witness it, and are the victims of want of decision, but on 
the unready persons themselves. A certain young lady 
(and of how many can this be said which is so true of 
one ! ) had a habit of debating whether she should rise or 
not at eight o'clock in the morning, and generally carried 
on this lazy unready debate so long that it was nine be- 
fore she got down. A direct consequence of this was 
that she was very angry with herself, and even if no word 
was said, felt miserable and at a discount. The unreadi- 
ness, begun in the morning, communicated itself to every 
other hour in the day: too late for breakfast, too late for 
dinner, too late for tea ; a miserable ten minutes or a 
quarter of an hour behind time ; and upon this hung the 
comfort, peace, and happiness of a whole family. In a 
burlesque essay the ' Saturday Review,' some years ago, 
insisted that early rising was a bad and an unchristian 
thing, because it made a man so thoroughly well satisfied 
with himself for all the day afterwards. He was too well 
pleased, too happy, to be good. Perhaps no stronger 
reason, and it is a very true and exact one, could be given 
in favour of early rising. 

The reverse holds good with lateness. Not to be ready 
for church, not to be ready for dinner, not to sit down to 
tea till all others are placed, — these seem small faults, but 



BE UP TO TIME. 43 

they make too many families essentially miserable. It is 
little use if we say that a wife has no other fault but that 
of never being up to time : that is enough to make any 
household a miserable one ; and it is worse when the head 
of the family is afflicted with a like disease. All mankind 
is weak, afflicted with infirmities, has its fears, its cowar- 
dices, its doubts, and thus it is easily led away from its 
purpose. When a nation is afflicted with the disease, it 
will very quickly fall into a certain want, desuetude, and 
decay. When any great part of the nation is thus afflicted 
— as our present House of Lords seems afflicted — it will 
be well to cut and prune away that part, so that the other 
be not poisoned by it. Speculation, doubt, a weighing of 
matters over and over again, is not the chief end of man ; 
it is prompt and energetic action. No proficiency in 
knowledge, cultivation, poetry, or the fine arts, can give 
a man anything like compensation for a want of decision, 
■ — a want of command over himself and his faculties. 
Reduce him to an aimless, actionless man, and you make 
less than an automaton of him. He will dally with and 
fritter away all the fine qualities he has, and become more 
contemptible than the untaught man, who does his little 
after his own small light. Readiness is especially a 
Christian virtue. The highest Voice that ever spake has 
cried out to us, ' Therefore be ye also ready,' and has, in 
the beautiful Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, 



44 



A MAJSTS THOUGHTS. 



urged with the greatest possible strength the folly of delay; 
for while we are horrified at the blank despair of those 
who were shut out in outer darkness, we read that l they 
that were ready went in with Him/ 







CHAPTER IV. 
THE HEROIC IN LIFE. 




CHAPTER IV. 

A Savage Young Couple — Love — The Heroic — Self -Delusion — 
Effeminate Heroes— A Narrow Age— True Heroism. 

N the Malay Archipelago, the pirates of 
which that great, good, and tender-hearted 
hero, Sir James Brooke, of Borneo, punished 
with judicial severity, man-slaying is a proof 
of greatness. In the island of Ceram no one is allowed 
to marry till he has cut off one human head at least, 
Angelina whispers to Edwin, ' Now you know we might 
settle and be a briital and idolatrous young couple, only 
you have not done that murder.' The head of a child 
will do, that of a woman is better, because she can cry 
out and kick and fight, or she is cunning enough to hide 
herself; but the head of a man is the best, and the head 
of a white man the most glorious trophy of all. On the 
surf-beaten coast many a good British vessel has gone to 
pieces, and the tired sailor, who has fought with the 
waves for dear life, and has escaped the hungry sea, has 



48 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

been brained by some lurking savage, and his head, with 
his fair English curls dabbled in blood, has been carried 
to some dark-skinned bride, or even worse, sold to some 
savage ' swell,' whose coward heart would not permit him 
to be a hero without it. 

For, twisted, bent, refracted, contorted, and miserably 
retorted, as this custom is by the baseless legends of the 
cruel and lying process of a bloody idolatry, it in some 
measure represents hero worship. Bad as the stupid 
savage must be who knocks a baby on the head, and 
fancies that he is doing a noble action, we may distil 
some kind of goodness out of him. Action is better than 
inaction ; to have done even that small amount of murder 
is nobler in his opinion than to have done nothing. What 
he selfishly desires is to be distinguished ; the blunder- 
headed, greedy, blear-eyed, glittering shark-toothed, mur- 
derous savage, he, too, would be a hero. 

We all have heroes and heroines — of a sort. Some 
pick out those who are distinguished from other men 
solely by their good looks, platonically supposing that to 
look good and to be good are the same ; others will 
demand cleverness ; others will throw aside excellence of 
form if they can get excellence of genius, capacity, or 
goodness. ' I did not marry my husband,' said a lady, 
'for beauty, but for brain.' — 'I would rather,' said 
another, ' have a handsome fool than an ugly philosopher ; 
I will please my eye, but I will plague my heart.' A 



LOVE FOR LOVES SAKE. 49 

third will follow out Goldsmith's excellent plan, which he 
puts down at the beginning of the ' Vicar of Wakefield,' 
' I chose my wife as she chose her wedding gown, not for 
beauty of material, but because it would last a long time.' 
But put it how people may, there are very few of the 
young who marry who fall in love with the real, actual, 
living person they see. 

It may be exceedingly annoying to Jones, but it is 
quite true that his little wife loves an ideal Jones, some 
one whom her imagination dresses up as a far different 
and far nobler being than Jones himself. 

Amelia, in ' Vanity Fair,' thinks that there is no one 
nobler, no one more clever, nobody handsomer than her 
George Osborne ; and he is not wise enough to see (and 
how happy are we who are not wise enough !) that the girl 
dotes upon her beautiful, her pure, her noble ideal — that 
all her heart has gone out to meet the big hero she has 
tricked out with the rainbow colours of love, and that she 
does not even know the selfish prig of a citizen's son, who 
struts about in his bones, his flesh, his good looks, his 
blue eyes, his curls, and his clothes. 

Do any people love us solely for ourselves ? Have we 
ever dared to strip off the mask of every-day actions, of 
pretended piety, of honesty which was policy, of gene- 
rosity which was advertisement, of firmness which arose 
from stupidity, of activity which had root in fear ? Save 
you, Mr. Smith : you are an Elder in your chapel and 

E 



50 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Mayor of your town ; your name, the local paper tells us, 
adorns the annals of the British merchant ; you are a 
self-made man, a paragon of uprightness, industry, and 
honour. How much of this is true ? — how much does it 
differ from the character of that other Mr. Smith whom 
you yourself and your Creator only know! From an 
innate feeling of unworthiness we get the proverb, * No 
man is a hero in the eyes of his valet ; ' an untrue 
proverb of real heroes, who are more heroic the more 
truly we know them, but a true one of most men, who 
are best at a distance, and cannot be known intimately. 
And what is said here of men may be applied to women 
with even greater force. They live in a little world by 
themselves. To the generous boy each one is a sacred 
and beautiful thing, full of generosity and self-sacrifice, 
existing as his mother, only to comfort him in sickness 
and to dower him with love ; as his sister, only to shield 
and to aid him, to cover his faults and to plead his 
excuses ; as his sweetheart, as something more beautiful 
than common humanity, some piece of Nature's handi- 
work of the finest porcelain, while he is of common clay. 
Too often marriage changes these heroines into mere 
women, of common vulgar passions ; somewhat worse 
because weaker than ourselves. 

The worship of the heroic is a very pretty pastime, and 
should be encouraged. We are best acquainted with it 
in that which some have called its birthplace, Greece, 



THE HEROIC. 51 

where the heroes were gifted with almost divine honours, 
and were said to have performed innumerable great 
deeds. The twelve labours of Hercules and the deeds 
of Orpheus were the wonder of the young men of Greece ; 
and the most entrancing poet of antiquity has given in 
his ' Iliad ' a gallery of heroes from the brave Achilles 
and noble Hector, the reflecting and patient Ulysses, to 
the terrible Ajax, and the aged essence of wisdom, Nestor, 
It is well that in the youth of the world we find qualities 
that are truly admirable placed among the heroic. As 
time runs on, we find other story-tellers inventing other 
heroes, but we never find them altogether untrue to that 
which is noble. Bravery and strength, good fortune and 
skill in man, are always worshipped in the rudest romances. 
Sir Guy of Warwick, Sir Bevis of Hampton, and the 
whole round of chivalric heroes, are always ready to 
shield the weak, to punish the strong, to help distressed 
damsels, and to fight giants. The mediaeval romances 
which turned the brain of Don Quixote were good so far, 
at least, or that noble gentleman would never have been 
fired into madness by reading them. Each hero, like 
Artegal, in Spenser's ' Faery Queen/ has a mission. His 
main object is, as we know, to rescue Irena from the 
tyranny of Grantosto ; but while on that mission he is 
ever ready to turn aside from his way to repress violence, 
to rescue innocence, and to punish the spirit of mischief, 
folly, and cruelty. Such a determination would be heroic 



52 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

at any time ; and happily we find the ideal hero of the 
modern romance just as ready as Palladius or Musidorus, 
or any of the noble heroes of Sidney's charming ' Arcadia.' 

The fashions of these ideal beings, however, change 
with the times. In this very ' Arcadia/ when any one 
goes to fight, he is always not only equal but superior to 
the occasion. We have been taunted with the fact that 
in our nautical dramas we made our one sailor always 
equal to three Frenchmen. One he killed with his 
cutlass, another with his pistol, and a third he knocked 
down with his quid of tobacco. So these very gentlemen, 
Palladius and Musidorus, are gifted with enormous fight- 
ing powers ; and even Shakspere, whose heroes are in 
general nature itself, has made his Orlando, a mere 
stripling, overthrow and nearly kill the * Duke's bony 
prizer,' when he wrestles. It is not every young man 
who can stand up against a prize-fighter and beat him ; 
but that is little in the life of a hero. 

After the grand romance in which the heroes had the 
strength of gods, and the heroines a divine beauty, 
troubled with superhuman sorrows, there came a time 
when people sickened of great fighters and noble fellows, 
and took to beaux and rakes as heroes. The hero of the 
play or the book in those times dwindled down to an 
effeminate creature, who had a woman's complexion and 
more than a woman's vanity ; who warbled amorous 
ditties, and was content to be made love to ; did not like 



VICIOUS HEROES. 53 

fighting, and was as feeble as he was effeminate There 
are signs that we have returned to this sort of creature in 
our plays and novels, and that such heroes are mostly 
drawn by the women. 'Nothing is more apparent in 

Mrs. 's novels/ said a reviewer, a few weeks ago,, 

1 than the tendency that the women have to make love to 
the men.' In the very popular play of ' Our American 
Cousin/ an actor evolved out of his own brain a most 
odious, although cleverly conceived character, Lord 
Dundreary \ who could not speak, look, talk, or walk,; 
who was selfish, stupid, cunning, and mean, as the women 
say, ' to a degree ; ' who, in most matters of life, was no 
better than a half-witted creature; and yet the ladies 
accepted him at once as a hero. The prettiest girl in 
the piece had to make love to him, and to be blunderingly 
accepted ; and this whole reversal of all that is true and 
noble, of all, in fact, that is heartily funny and laughable^ 
was accepted, and is accepted now, with considerable 
applause, by the unthinking. 

The vicious and effeminate heroes of Congreve's days, 
men who are always plotting against some woman's 
honour, some husband's peace, cheating some confiding 
father or gentle wife, still retained a certain amount of 
courage, that quality being always essential to man; but 
beyond that, they had scarcely one human virtue. 
Fielding, with a high scorn for what is effeminate in.mar^ 



54 A MAJSPS THOUGHTS. 

makes his heroes strong as well as brave and generous, 
and especially open, bold, and manly. 

His Tom Jones has a good appetite, can drink, eat, 
fight, make love, and enjoy himself, and is quite a 
different being from a coxcomb. For a time his healthy 
school prevailed, until we got into a more romantic and 
sickly period, wherein every hero was bound to visit old 
castles, to rescue damsels, to see ghosts, and to go 
through much peril for the sake of a timid and shrinking 
heroine, who never went to bed without gazing on the 
moon and pouring out her complaints in a copy of verses* 

The fashions of heroines had in the meantime under- 
gone material but not such great changes. We are fond 
of good women in England, and our heroines are all of 
that excellent pattern which includes goodness ; but we 
have had the arch, the hoydenish, the masculine,, and the 
mawkish young lady. We have grown fond of those 
who were always in trouble and always shedding tears. 
At about this period of the history of romance the 
heroine very often went mad; and, as Sheridan says, 
when the chief lady went mad in white satin,, the faithful 
attendant went mad' in white muslin. We have even for- 
gotten how necessary it was for a heroine to have a faith- 
ful attendant to whom she could pour out her sorrows,, 
and who always at the right time brought the ladder of 
ropes to enable her to escape from the cruel father. 
Nay, our very fathers have ceased to be cruel m x such is 



SENTIMENT AND ROMANCE. 55 

fashion in romance : and, more wondrous change still, 
our Frenchmen now are polite, generous, brave, and very 
accomplished fellows. Formerly we only used Johnny 
Crapaud to laugh at ; he was always starved, and priest 
and king-ridden, as Hogarth coarsely wrote — 

With lantern jaws and croaking guts 
The braggart Frenchman proudly struts. 

And yet our Plantagenet wars, and our wars under 
Marlborough, ought to have made us respect that most 
honourable, gallant, and brave nation that lives across 
the Channel. Never had one nation a more constant 
and gallant foe, always ready to fight, and always with 
spirit and honour, than had England in the French. 

After the romantic hero, there succeeded, led on by 
Henry Mackenzie, the sentimental, soft, reflective, and 
very good hero, the Man of Feeling, whose heart was 
open as the day to melting charity, and who never did a 
good action, or relieved a case, without quoting a fine 
mouth-rounding sentiment, such as, * The man who will 
see his humble brother starve while he has plenty is un- 
worthy of/ &c. ; or if he defended a woman from a 
ruffian, he would use the celebrated formula., * The man 
who would raise his hand against a woman, save in the 
way of kyindness, is unworthy of the name of a British 
seaman.' But this sort of hero was altogether too good 
for the British public, and did not last long. It is a cruel 



$6 A MAJSTS THOUGHTS. 

thing to say, but it is true, — the people, as a rule, do not 
believe in good young men. The very way to be thought 
really bad, is to appear to be good. These excellent 
young heroes produced a revolution of feeling. With 
something like a relief we turn from the sentimental 
goodness of Joseph Surface to the downright raking 
wickedness of Charles Surface. People could believe in 
one, but not in the other. It will be some years yet 
before the public really believes in the pattern hero. 

After the sentimental hero came the utterly bad 
villainous fellow, the Byronic person, 'linked with one 
virtue and a thousand crimes/' the fellow eaten up with 
murders and remorse. Women shed abundant tears 
over this villainous puppet in black boots and blacker 
ringlets, and he lasted for a time, till Walter Scott brought 
back the pure and the noble ideal of a true, honest, able, 
conscientious gentleman, whom a woman can love. 
Counting one or two aberrations in favour of highway- 
men, we have this pattern of hero now, except that some 
of the best men writers have despaired of drawing a hero, 
and have made their chief man but a negative personage,, 
while the women have run wild with the notion that it is 
the province of the hero to have love made to him, not 
by him. Some great authors have been content to draw 
heroes unutterably base, under the notion that they copy 
from life ; but these are exceptions. 

Can we admire anything pure ? A great noise deafens 



LOOK HIGHER. 57 

us, too much light blinds us, large excellence makes us 
suspect, much goodness is all too exalted for us grovelling 
earth-worms. Is not the bad boy in the family a hero to 
his little sisters? and was not, after all, Master Tom 
Jones inferior to what was seen of Master Blifil, and yet 
preferred before him ? We admire that which is physi- 
cally perfect, we fall to raptures over a statue, over a 
living Antinous ; we are delighted with a horse or a bull 
which is a model of beauty. Why should we not equally 
love a noble good man and woman when we meet them ? 
Why ostracise Aristides merely because he is called 'The 
Just'? Norris of Bemerton, from whom Dr. Blair and 
Mr. Thomas Campbell stole their ' angel-visits few and 
far between,' gives the precise reason why we love faulty 
rather than perfect heroes. It is not because they are 
more like ourselves, nearer to our own weakness — as if a 
vase with a crack could not love that which is whole — 
but because of the weakness of our mortal nature. For 
what he says of joys we may apply, without much vio- 
lence, to heroes : — 

Those who soonest take their flight, 
Are the most exquisite and strong, 

Like angel-visits short and bright ; 
Mortality's too weak to bear them long. 

Poor Human Nature ! Here, in this very quotation, is 
her weakness discovered. The Campbell-Blair imitation 



5 8 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

has not half the beauty of the original, but the world pre- 
fers the paste, and rejects the diamond ! 

The Hero and Heroine fulfil in fiction very important 
functions. The author should always paint from life, 
but must add, of course, points which are noble, and 
matter which exalts. While the imagination is young 
and fresh, it feeds upon noble qualities ; it demands 
truth, honesty, and bravery in its men ; purity and 
devotion in its women. The very meanest of mankind 
looks to something nobler than himself; the higher 
natures look to something better still. The author who 
has sufficient skill to paint from Nature need not fear to 
make his hero too good, or his heroine too noble ; for 
human nature, in every nation and in every time, while 
too fertile in bad things, can show instances of the 
grandest goodness, and of almost divine excellence. 




CHAPTER V. 

WHICH TREATS OF LARGE 
NATURES. 



CHAPTER V. 

• School ' — The Manager — Lear and Hamlet — Money's True 
Power — The Age of Elizabeth — Higher Levels — But One Man 
Wanted — Large Minds Dominated by Small Ones — The 
Happy Wife— Salt of the Earth. 

^N a very pretty modern comedy, which is 
admirably suited to its age and audience, 
but which an after and a wider age may 
perhaps look upon as feeble, if not foolish, 
there are one or two sentences which cause reflection. 
This is indeed to be wondered at, for wit and wisdom 
have equally been, for a long time, almost banished from 
our stage. - My dear sir,' said a manager, only the other 
day, to an author, 'your piece is too good.' 'But you 
have an educated audience?' 'Yes, pretty well; they are 
first-rate families.' 'Well, then,' persisted the unfortunate 
author, ' they can understand it.' 'Understand it ! — yes,' 




62 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

cried the manager, ' but hang it, man, it won't do ; you 

make the people think, — and you would empty my theatreV 

The manager was wise in his generation. People do 

not go to a theatre as they once did ; the newspaper, the 

magazine, and the thoughtful essay furnish reflective 

natures with enough food for the mind, and they do 

their thinking at home. At a theatre they expect to be 

amused ; and, as a rule, the poorer audience, so that you 

do not reach the ' roughs ' and ' groundlings,' is by far 

the wiser and better. Rich folk, who dine at seven or 

eight, do not desire to sit out Shakspere, with those 

enormous problems of his, which are so plentiful in 

Hamlet or Lear. Take the reflection of the guilty king 

at his prayers : — 

May one be pardon'd, and retain the offence ? 
In the corrupted currents of this world, 
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice j 
And oft 'tis seen, the wicked prize itself 
Buys out the law : But 'tis not so above : 
There is no shuffling ; there the action lies 
In his true nature. 

Or take some of the tremendous invectives of Lear 
against lazy luxury. Would our wealthy do-nothing 
classes sit and listen to them 1 No. Our modern plays 
must please to live, or they will not live to please. It is 
not often, therefore, that we come upon one line or 
sentence worth remembering or repeating. 

In the comedy referred to, a rich nobleman does what 



WHAT MONEY DOES. 63 

few rich noblemen have the brains or the pluck or the 
good fortune to do : he falls in love with a pretty pupil- 
teacher, who has abundance of everything in the world, 
except money. She has beauty, health, sense, modesty, 
form, learning, strength, good-nature, and sweet humility; 
and yet when this young lord asks her whether she has a 
lover, she says, 'No, my lord, because I am so poor;* 
upon which comes, very appropriately, though the 
audience hardly catches it — ' Poor ! How these great 
natures do mistake themselves ! ' 

How they do indeed ! — and yet scarcely so. They 
have all the world, or all the world that is worth having, 
in themselves. Money, as the author elsewhere remarks, 
can buy nothing that they have. ' Ten thousand a year 
could not fight in the Crimea, could by itself not look well, 
speak well, and eat well. Ten thousand a-year could not 
put its arm round your waist, could it ? ' Money is the 
most empty windbag in the world when you have it; 
when you have it not, it appears a horse of a different 
colour; and if 'great natures' mistake that fact, they 
must indeed be mistaken. But do they? What are 
these natures 1 Is one man so different from another 
that there is a specific difference — a larger, wider utterance 
— a nobler heart ? 

We think that there is ; and not only in men, but in 
ages ; although in no time does God leave himself with- 
out witnesses in the world, who ' stand out,' as painters 



64 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

say, up and above their fellow-men, as mountains do 
above the plain. 

Sometimes, when people are debased, we see the re- 
mains of these men, of smaller growth it may be, but yet 
great men, standing, like the solitary Round Towers of 
Ireland, to remind us of a forgotten age. Sometimes 
these large and beautiful natures are so unhappily born 
and placed that they dwindle, and become narrow. One 
might as well have tried to be publicly great in the days 
of George I. and Walpole, as an ordinary standard foot- 
soldier might to attain the stature of an Amalekite. The 
whole nation was grovelling and mean. Hogarth's pic- 
tures were sold literally dirt cheap/ Shakspere could not 
draw an audience. An edition of him was looked at as a 
curiosity ; and learned critics, when they did speak of 
him, spoke of a rude and uncultivated fellow, a wild, un- 
taught genius, who did not know how to write a play. 
Cibber and Tate altered his ' Lear,' and brought Cordelia 
to life again. Vice was publicly taught upon the stage 
as a spirited thing. Everything was distraught. The 
finest geniuses — probably the two men who, in a nobler 
age, would have come nearest to Shakspere — William 
Collins and Thomas Chatterton, were left to die ; one by 
melancholy madness, and the latter (poor hasty, clever, 
wicked boy) of the more furious and impatient madness, 
suicide. As for the Church, it was about as narrow as it 
could be, and the Nonconformists were yet worse. The 



SPENSER'S PLATO NISM. 65 

country gentlemen were mere sloths, the town inhabitants 
so unwise as to bury in towns such numbers of people, 
that the graveyards, as Evelyn remarks of Norwich in a 
former age, rose above the churches, which seemed sunk 
in holes, to the 'great detriment and poysoning,' says a 
doctor, of the inhabitants who lived round them. In 
history, and in memoirs of the time, one can see these 
bad times coming on. One can mark the vice or the 
folly, at first only obscurely condemned, then unnoticed, 
and then welcomed. You may perceive, as you read, 
the dying out of religion, poetry, and the fine arts. In 
portraits of the day you see the people grow uglier, more 
bovine, animal-like, and mindless. ' There is no fine 
temple,' insists the Platonist Spenser, ' but a fine spirit 
chooses it to dwell in.' We cannot go so far as to say 
that ; but truly there never has been a fine or heroic age 
or race, as regards form and feature, but we have had fine 
minds and larger natures dwelling with man \ and this is 
to be proved not only by paintings, but by books. Such 
plays and poems as Massinger's ' Virgin Martyr,' Spenser's 
' Faery Queen,' the poems of Robert Browning, the best 
novels of Charles Kingsley, or, let us say, the social 
writings of John Ruskin, could by no possibility have 
been produced under the dull German king, who hated 
1 boetry and bainting,' and loved only money and sensual 
pleasure. The texture of the minds and of the times was 

F 



66 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

utterly different. People of the one age really could not 
understand the other. 

Where'er a noble deed is wrought, 
Where'er a noble thought is thought, 
Our hearts in glad surprise 
To higher levels rise ! 

So sings the poet upon the quiet, unpretending goodness 
of Miss Nightingale and the small band of lady nurses in 
the Crimea. Unfortunately for humanity, we are forced 
to own that the * higher levels ' that one age achieves are 
often left high and dry by its succeeding age. 

The larger natures amongst men and families are to be 
met with under the most extraordinary and unforeseen 
circumstances. To no one nation, family, or class does 
Almighty wisdom allow a monopoly of goodness. So 
much do children differ, that Shakspere makes one of his 
characters attribute the fact to the influence of a sublime 
and supernatural Power, rather than to education : — 

It is the stars, 
The stars above us, govern our conditions ; 
Else one self mate and mate could not beget 
Such different issues. 

And although some tricks of face and limb may be here- 
ditary, and capacity and talent are often inherited, we 
may find many a father with a mean, grovelling, and 
narrow mind succeeded by a son who is quite his opposite 
— generous, or even profuse. The old miser, who has 



ONE GREAT MAN 67 

scraped all his life, and has starved himself to amass 
money, seems to have taught his son to do exactly the 
reverse ; the very meanness of his life has shown, by an 
example more potent than any amount of preaching, the 
folly of avarice; and the mean, penurious father pro- 
duces a ' larger nature ' in a profuse son. Actually, how- 
ever, the selfishness of the man who dissipates is often 
just as great as that of him who accumulates ; both are 
actuated by vanity, but show it in different ways. The 
larger nature is not necessarily profuse, although it is 
always generous, sometimes even to excess. 

Nor does it always happen, notwithstanding the happi- 
ness which the world receives from them, that those of 
an expansive and generous mind are either successful 
men or happy in themselves. The world hardly knows 
where it misses them ; it is brought to a lower level ; it 
is miserable in its results. One such man will insensibly 
affect a whole age, just as a great general will establish or 
uphold an empire. There is a French anecdote about 
Marlborough which is here very much to the point. 
After the battle at Hochstadt or of Blenheim, in which 
Marlborough had so utterly and decisively beaten his 
opponents, while taking note of the prisoners the General 
saw a fine grenadier, stalwart, proud, and unbending, 
even though beaten. ' Ah,' said he in French, ' if Louis 
XIV. had a hundred thousand such men as you, he 
would carry on the war a little differently.' ' 'Tis not,' 



68 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

said the soldier, as he saluted him, ' 'tis not a hundred 
thousand such as me that he wants, mon general, but one 
such a man as you.' So, when the mean and subtle get 
possession of the State, or of the direction of public 
opinion, when financiers, political economists of the 
worst class, mere speculators and traders, have the direc- 
tion of public affairs, the whole tone of a nation's thoughts 
and actions become petty, for 

Honour sinks where Commerce long prevails. 

Athens and Rome, raised by heroes, fell at last to huck- 
sters. The throne of the empire of Rome was put up to 
public auction, and sold to perhaps the meanest of 
mortals ; for he who would dare to purchase a dignity 
without having the inherent capacity for it, must be a 
mean-souled hind, to be abominated and accursed with 
all the comminations of Lent. Happily the poor wretch 
was punished even by the honour he sought : the swords 
of the Praetorians who had sold the dignity washed away 
the stain in the blood of the purchaser. 

The larger nature, wherever it is found, is very attrac- 
tive. Smaller minds cling to it, as little particles of steel 
fly towards a magnetised bar. As Plutarch well saw, Brutus, 
who was of the breed of noble blood which Rome so 
soon lost, was necessary for the success of the plot against 
Caesar. The narrow soul of the mean and plotting 
Cassius could not carry all the weight of the conspiracy. 



NARROW VIEWS. 69 

It was necessary to attach the nobler nature ; and then, 
as Cassius saw, others would follow. But it is observable 
that in that case, as in many others, the larger nature 
was dominated by the narrower. Cassius governed 
Brutus, even while he wondered at his goodness and 
greatness ; but he did it by cunning. Generally, the 
mean nature is utterly opposed to the wider, because it 
really does not understand what the larger nature does. 
A painter descanting enthusiastically upon the beauties 
of the setting sun, turned round to his auditor, and saw 
upon his face a contemptuous smile. Great natures do 
not half so much mistake themselves as they are mis- 
taken, and the confidence of ignorance plumply denies 
what it cannot understand. The larger nature, which is 
occupied with heavenly things, while all around it grope 
after things of the earth, is treated as Hamlet is by his 
mother in the ghost scene : — 

Q. Alas, he's mad ! To whom do you speak this ? 

H. Do you see nothing there 1 

Q. Nothing at all ; yet all, thai is, I see. 

H. Nor did you nothing hear ? 

Q. No, nothing but ourselves. 

We believe that we can see everything, and that the 
genius or the larger nature is romantic, nighty, and not 
to be trusted. We measure the world by the tape-yard we 
carry with us, and refuse to trust in anything beyond the 
rule of thumb. Very often the great nature is maddened 



70 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

soured, and disappointed. He who would have made 
all so happy is rendered miserable ; he who would have 
discoursed music ' most eloquent ' is set to discord. 

This narrowing of large views, this moral ossification of 
the noble heart, is a process at first so slow and imper- 
ceptible to the victim that it is very dangerous. Some- 
times a great blow, a terrible loss, a sickness which makes 
the patient rise a new man ; or a disappointment which 
never can be got over, will awaken him or her who is 
drifting towards the rapids. But ordinarily women sink 
quietly to the lower level, and their nobler natures die 
without a sign, ' what is fine within them growing coarse 
to sympathise with clay.' For noble natures require food, 
excitement, deeds, and thoughts to feed on. Do we 
grow hot-house grapes on the north-east wall of a poor 
cottage, or English pine-apples in the bare exercise yard 
of a workhouse ? You must exercise your horses and use 
dumb-bells to keep up your biceps, and will you let your 
virtue starve ? Can you feel noble amongst those who 
never utter a noble sentiment, or give birth to a fine 
thought ? whose talk is of cattle, whose ambition is finer 
company, whose god is their gold ? In our Sisterhoods, 
in which there is much good no doubt mixed with follies 
and failures, since they are human, the Principals find it 
necessary to send the sisters back to comfortable houses 
and good furniture, sound living, pictures, music, and the 
world, so much are their spirits saddened and deadened 



INNOCENT JOY. 71 

by the sordid evils that they see. So, too, the soul of the 
large nature demands its own music, or, like the sky-lark 
that lives with sparrows, it becomes dumb- 

And what shall a large nature do at home surrounded 
by small ones, each with some small grievance, each with 
a continuous grumble ? Simply bear all, and do better. 
We find these people in every street ; broadly speaking, 
there are such in every house. Too often we meet with 
families before whom a noble sentiment is never uttered, 
who never hear the voice of prayer, nor that of gene- 
rosity or of compassion, except in a poem or a play. 
To overreach others, to succeed in life, to make money, 
to enjoy themselves — and even then to take a mean 
enjoyment — is the whole life of some. To rejoice in 
others' pain, to be glad when others fail, to believe that 
their own lot is the dullest and least to be desired, to 
envy all who are above them, and to take no present joy 
in what they have, is too often the rule of life of these 
poor creatures. Poor indeed ! They are narrowed by 
their own vices, punished by their own sins ; they shut 
their eyes and will not see, close their ears and will not 
hear. But from among them comes one whose life is 
joyous and free, and in whom not all the deadening 
intercourse of common life can destroy or hurt the larger 
nature. To her there exist all the virtues : she believes 
in generosity, for she is generous ; in self-sacrifice, for 
she will leny herself; in goodness, for she is good ; in 



72 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

pity, for she will weep at the sorrows of others ; in smiles 
and laughter, for the merriment of boys and girls, and 
the gambols of children, will make her heart rejoice. 
Happy is such a one ; happy as well as great are those 
who refuse to take a narrow, cruel view, and who, out of 
the expansive nature of their own hearts, find goodness 
and wisdom in others. He whose example taught us to 
bear with all and love all, also gave us this consolation : 
that when we carry out His behests, we surely become 
the salt of the earth, the salt that preserves our very 
corruptible human nature from becoming corrupt, and 
that makes a good man's soul like a looking-glass, which, 
receiving the sunshine of heaven, reflects it to the dark 
corners of the earth, lighting up what is obscure and 
dismal, but losing no particle of the divine rays itself 







CHAPTER VI. 

SELF-CULTURE, SELF-RESTRAINT, 
AND SELF-RESPECT. 



CHAPTER VI. 

The Tub of Diogenes — Conquerors not great — Byron! s Dog — 
Culture of Self — Prudence: its Value — Life, beautiful and free 
— Men are not Machines — Self respect — The Hermit of Ham- 
pole — Indulgences should be, destroyed. 




,N what kind of tub did Diogenes live ? Was 
it an old washing-tub, shallow and broad, or 
long and deep, like a wine cask? It is 
more than two thousand two hundred and 
eighty years since the ragged old philosopher lived. He 
was not worth one penny ; he never applied his notions 
of self-help to making money ; he despised, flouted, and 
hated the merely rich men, the fig-merchants and oil- 
merchants of Athens ; but his name lives, and it is plea- 
sant to read, think, and talk of him, while not a name 
among those of his ' bloated ' and purse-swollen contem- 



76 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

poraries is familiar to any of us. How is this ? That 
question we may be able to answer by and by. 

In the meantime, what sort of tub did he live in ? for 
we may be assured that the legend is a true one. At one 
time the philosopher dwelt in a deserted dog-kennel at 
the entrance of one of the temples ; at another time it 
appears that he had found without an owner, and occu- 
pied, one of those huge earthen jars in which the rich 
Greek merchants stored their oil, and which, in that land 
of sunshine and blue skies, must have formed a warm and 
comfortable residence. Its mouth was some four feet in 
diameter, and its depth quite sufficient for a man to stand 
up in, like that of the jars of Hadgi Baba, in which the 
Forty Thieves took refuge. As this ■ tub ' lay on its side, 
the warm morning sun streaming down upon the opposite 
one, and into its mouth, must have afforded a pleasant 
warmth to the basking philosopher, and will explain that 
immortal sentence of his in reply to Alexander the 
Great, — that essence of self-respect which will fitly open 
our Essay. 

As we may be sure Diogenes would not go to see 
Alexander, that great conqueror (and conquerors were 
then much greater men than now, our philosophy placing 
them at a very low figure,) went to see him, surrounded 
by a glittering corps of courtiers, generals with short flat 
clanking swords that struck against their mailed buskins 
with a pleasant rattle, while figures of Pallas and her owl 



OUT OF MY SUNSHINE. 77 

adorned their helmets, from which streamed the blood-red 
plumes, dreadful to the eyes of maidens, and to babes, 
as we know from Homer's well-known verses. We can 
fancy the noise and swagger of this Grecian hero, and the 
little philosopher with bare shoulders peeping from his 
ragged cloak as he looked out of his oil-cask and watched 
the glittering train approach ; and we can almost see the 
monarch stand before the tub, as well as hear the sounding 
Greek of the question, ' What can Alexander of Macedon 
do for Diogenes ? ' The reply was, ' Get out of my 
sunshine ! ' 

How thoroughly answered must the conqueror have 
been 1 How dumb-foundered must his courtiers have 
felt ! There was really nothing else for the poor man to 
do but to mouth that silly attempt at a quid pro quo — ' If 
I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.' Diogenes 
had shown that he was greater than Alexander, and re- 
mained in his tub master of the situation. We have in 
Winckelmann's engraved gems one from the antique of 
Diogenes leaning out of this vast pipkin as we have de- 
scribed it ; and what gives the" gem a great feature of 
truth is the fact that the jar is useless as a jar, having a 
large crack in its side, which has been fruitlessly mended 
by dovetails of lead ; but finding that the oil or wine 
still exuded, the merchants have thrown it away, and 
Diogenes, obliged to no one, puts it to its world- 
renowned use. 



78 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Diogenes is an extreme instance of the weight of self- 
respect. He had reduced himself to first principles ; he 
was nothing but skin, flesh, muscles and bone, for he 
would have gone without clothes had the Athenians per- 
mitted him ; but he was Diogenes. He had no money 
wherewith to bribe any judge ; no great train of attend- 
ants ; no rich clothing ; not a shred of gold as an orna- 
ment ; no furniture. He had one cracked wooden 
bowl, from which he drank; but seeing a boy drink 
out of his hollowed hand, he threw his bowl away. How 
many of the rich citizens of Athens would have given 
half their fortunes for permission to feast Alexander ! 
But that conqueror did not come to see them ; they did 
not respect themselves, for they had degraded their lives 
with useless labour and selfish care ; they were to be 
loved for their possessions, their feasts; but Diogenes 
was respected for himself. 

We would not hold the cynic up as an example to be 
followed. The time for such extreme and feverish hatred 
of mankind, as is exemplified in Shakspere's ' Timon of 
Athens,' is gone by. Although almost all great men have 
found the world ' but as the world/ a place of trial, in 
which Summer friends follow Summer fortunes, and 
the chilling Winter of disrespect accompanies poverty 
and fallen greatness ; although History attests that kings 
have died solitary, and that great ministers, when they 
have fallen, have had hardly one of all those whom they 



SELF-CULTURE. 79 

have loaded with favours to attend them, yet the wise 
man will endeavour to love those whom he finds so 
fragile, fickle, and false. 

People who rail against the world do neither it nor 
themselves good. The satirist is hated, though he speaks 
the truth ; the solitary is disliked — 

I was a stricken deer, which left the herd, 

says the poet ; but when he left the herd, the herd de- 
serted him, and left him to lonely madness ; and if Lord 
Byron has attested on the tombstone of a dog, that the 
faithful animal was in his opinion a nobler animal than 
Man, and worthier of friendship, Man has had his re- 
venge on the noble poet, who died self-banished from the 
society he scorned. 

The wisest way in the conduct of life is to know what 
Man is, and to endeavour to improve ourselves by the 
lesson. That is the shortest way to attain self-culture ; 
for culture does not consist in learning several languages, 
nor in knowing how to order a dinner, or clearly to 
express our hopes, fears, and prayers, in various tongues 
— there are many tongues on earth, but only one in 
Heaven, as the epigraph upon Messrs. Bagster's admi- 
rable editions of the Scriptures tells us — nor in being 
able to solve an equation, or calculate an eclipse \ but it 
does consist in having so instructed the soul that it shall 
be gentle in demeanour, affectionate but bold, ready to 



80 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

bear success or non-success, and to walk this stage of life 
with proper and decent composure, exhibiting due love 
and respect for the good and the true, and no excessive 
amount of scorn for the base. This is a very hard lesson 
either for a man or a nation. For the young, who, as a 
rule, have a strong natural impulse for what is good, it is 
very difficult indeed not to despise the foolish and the 
wrong. For the strong in moral force, it is again more 
difficult not to despise the weak and tortuous. For the 
humorous and satirical (and young people have almost 
always an abundant supply of good humour and sound 
satire) it is most difficult of all ^not to indulge in funny 
hits, and sneers, and savage satire. Let us take two 
great satirists, Swift and Pope, the first a much bolder 
and nobler spirit than the second ; it is difficult to con- 
ceive a more unhappy life than that which Swift spent ; 
it is difficult to find any works more full than Swift's of 
biting hits, sly innuendoes, satiric praise, and savage 
satire ; and this humour culminated in that popular work, 
' Gulliver's Travels,' wherein he makes horses nobler than 
men, paints women as lascivious apes, and causes his 
hero to retire to his stable, having learnt the language of 
horses, to enjoy a respite from the baseness which sur- 
rounded him. But does such satire do good ? When 
they buried this great man (for we hold that he was a 
great and a good man, and of an exceedingly tender 
heart), they said of him in his epitaph that they had laid 



POPE AND JUVENAL. 81 

him where cruel indignation (sceva indignatio) could never 
vex him more. Were men more base in his time than in 
Shakspere's ? Hardly so ; and yet we find in the greater 
poet and wiser intellect much more genial excuse for the 
follies and wickedness of man, and even a love for the 
erring brothers and sisters who drew their breath upon 
the same planet, and were surrounded by the same 
temptations and follies as himself As for Pope, it is 
unfortunately the truth that every new life of that philo- 
sophical and admirable poet reveals a greater amount of 
the very cunning he despised, and the baseness he 
satirized. And if these great men cannot escape the 
common weakness of humanity, how shall the ordinary 
type of mankind escape ? Self-culture will teach him his 
own weakness ; and a knowledge of that should teach 
him kindness ; which, after all, pays best, and is a proof 
of the greatest wisdom. 

From self- culture, by which a man (and of course we 
here include the other sex, and if you like it the nobler 
though they' are ' much of a muchness ') will learn his 
weaknesses as well as his better qualities, he will also 
learn self-restraint. It is well to know just what we can 
do well, and what we cannot do ; what we can bear, and 
where we must forbear ; where we are strong, and where 
we are weak. A very weak man may appear a strong 
one if he is only tried upon his good points. As Juvenal, 
Sat. x. 365, says, with a sneer at Fortune — 

G 



82 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Nullum numen habes, si sit prudentia : sed te 
Nos facimus, Fortuna, Deam, cceloque locamus. 

1 Even Fortune is no goddess if a man be only prudent ; 
for, after all, it is we who make Fortune a goddess and 
place her in Heaven.' That is, it is to our weakness that 
our belief in luck is due, and that proper prudence will 
supply it. So we may say that a man should never want 
prudence if he attains self-restraint, based upon self- 
knowledge. 

Half the nostrums of the world, which wise men, or those 
who deem themselves wise, put forward to cure the evils 
of society, will be put out of course by self-restraint. No 
one except the most ardent teetotallers would argue that 
it is a sin to taste wine. The sin consists in the excess, 
and although vegetarians have a much better cause, for 
on the face of the question it seems cruel to kill animals 
to feed on them, perhaps they might listen to reason 
where moderation is exercised. Self-restraint will make 
every kind of enjoyment lawful in its proper time and 
place, will induce good 'health, and satisfaction in life ; 
will make our work a pleasure, our exercise delightful, 
our rest and sleep refreshing. In these, also, we should 
be careful and moderate. In fact there is nothing in 
life that can be indulged in to excess without hurt to soul 
and body. In like manner there is hardly anything in 
life that need be shunned as a sin or a folly if taken 
properly — used and not abused. 



LIFE SHOULD BE FREE. S3 

From self-culture and self-restraint springs self- 
respect. To attain this we must be moderate in work 
as well as in enjoyment ; and this moderation in work — 
and in grasping the results of work, pay, place, or 
honour — one of the purest and best writers of this age, 
Professor Ruskin, has been usefully prominent in recom- 
mending. Man's life should be beautiful and free. He 
has no right to degrade himself to the level of a machine, 
and for the bare sake of living to waste and throw away 
all that makes life worth having. Can we expect the 
young to honour the old, or to respect the mystery of 
life itself, if all that is presented to them in the life- 
time of their elders be one dull round of work, business, 
dining, and sleeping ? Is life worth having at the price 
of a constant dull struggle with sordid matters, with 
buying and selling, with attempted advancement by 
getting over the heads of others, without the relief of one 
noble or generous action or one wide-minded sentiment ? 
Life was not given to be spent in a round of pleasure ; 
but some pleasure, and of the higher sort, every life 
should have. Parents, teachers, and thinkers should 
look to this. The wild reaction of youth, yes, and of age 
too, against the dull, cold religion, the sordid gains and 
continual work around them, is a protest not to be dis- 
regarded. What wonder is it that we are called shop- 
keepers, ' a nation of shopkeepers/ buyers and sellers, 
and Philistines, if all we think of is mere shopkeeping? 



84 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

We do not say that every one of us is so given, but by 
far the larger part of this nation is. The legislature seems 
incapable of taking large, wise, and far-off views. It is 
content to legislate merely for the present ; it is intent 
upon saving a few pounds in its executive, while it lets 
its army, its militia, and its general defences remain upon 
a basis which is ridiculous for its insecurity. It allows 
some of the best workmen in the world either to stand 
idle or to emigrate in discontent, and then wonders that 
other countries do not respect us. Great Britain must 
first respect herself. Her history is glorious, her capacity 
enormous, her industry prodigious ; and yet Prussia has 
just told us in so many words that she will take the lead, 
and cry, as Paracelsus, the German quack physician, 
cried to the ancients, 'Get thee behind me, England, 
France, Spain, and Italy, for I am the true leader of the 
world.' It is clear that Germany does not lack self- 
respect. 

And with men and with nations this feeling is the one 
great desideratum. A man must respect himself to be of 
weight in life. Modesty and retirement are admirable 
virtues, but they are not at all inconsistent with the fact 
of a man's knowing that he has done his best ; that he 
has been thoroughly honest, that he has used, and to the 
best advantage, the talent that God has given him. Self- 
respect will be the result of self-culture and self-restraint, 
and the last will become more and more easy every time it 



SELF-GOVERNMENT. 85 

is practised. It is well for a man in reading, sleeping, 
walking, eating, and drinking, sometimes to limit himself, 
sometimes to indulge ; to take care that he at no time 
becomes a slave to one passion, or to one habit, by 
rigorously repressing any, even the slightest indication 
that way. If he is fond of wine, let him abandon it for 
a month or so ; if his pipe becomes an indulgence, let 
him throw it away j if he finds an increasing love of rest 
and sitting, let him rise and walk. It is no merit in him 
to be a hard drinker, or a continual smoker, or to sleep 
after dinner ; but it is a merit to keep the animal within 
him under control. A railway driver, who found that he 
could not stop nor stay his engine, nor reverse its action 
when he wanted, would soon find out the reason, and go 
to the engineer and have the matter looked to. When 
our habits are our slaves we can respect ourselves ; when 
we are slaves to our habits no one will respect us. In this 
category of habits let us place indulgence in certain feelings 
and actions. It will be as well at times rigidly to control 
the tongue, to determine, let us say for a whole day, to say 
no more of Jones than we actually know, and to say that 
good-naturedly; to bridle and manage the thoughts, so 
as easily to banish evil thoughts, ill-nature, despondency, 
doubt, &c, and to correct want of charity and kindliness 
by forcing ourselves to be charitable and kind. What a 
mean opinion must a man have of himself if he has to 
confess, ' Well, I cannot be truthful, nor good-natured, 



S6 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

nor honest, if I try ! My tongue always runs away with 
me : I never speak well of anybody ; I do not do any 
good ; I have left no kindly remembrance in the hearts 
of any one.' This must indeed be a terrible confession. 
In Richard Rolle's ' Pricke of Conscience/ written about 
1340, the good monk, surnamed the Hermit of Hampole, 
thus pictures the end of man's life : 

The last ende of man's life es hard, 
That es, when he drawes to ded-ward ; 
For when he es seke, and bedreden lys, 
And sore feble that he may noght rys, 
Than er men in dout and noght certayn 
Wether he shall ever cover -agayn ; 

begin, in fact, as we do now, to reckon up ' the poor 
dying man ' ; but, at the same time, the conscience within 
is at the same work, and its deadliest ' pricke ' must be 
that which condemns a man's self; for it is the very pivot 
and centre of Christian faith that a man shall pronounce 
his own doom, and so ' accusing and excusing ' himself, 
may know how his account lies. Unable as he is of him- 
self to boast of any merit, he will know whether he has 
done his best, and whether he can claim that guerdon 
which will be based on self-respect. 



CHAPTER VIL 
A WORKING MAN'S PARLIAMENT. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Why Justice is blind — British Elections — Too much Talk — 
Right will conquer — Advice of Mr. Ruskin — Nobility of 
Labour — Delight in Work — Future of England — The Rights 
of Man — Few real Wants — Money and its Worth. 




'EFORE the awe-full throne of Zeus,' said 
Hesiod, ' Dike stands and weeps whenever 
the earthly judge decides wrongly;' that is, 
to translate the passage from Grecian into 
English nomenclature, Justice, standing before the throne 
of God, laments at the wickedness, prejudice, or discord 
of human judgments. ' No wonder, then/ adds a caustic 
clergyman, remembering the judgments of county magis- 
trates, ' that our modern sculptors represent Justice on 
town halls with a bandage on her eyes : she has seen so 
much injustice that she has gone weeping blind.' 



go A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Dike, or Justice, must weep very often at a British 
election. She must have wept when she heard the non- 
sensical harangues of one or the other party, the appeals 
to the passions of the audience or mob, the misrepresen- 
tations, the false assertions, the folly of both. We Eng- 
lish live in a kindly way in general ; but here were 
gentlemen assuring their respective parties that the other 
parties were complete ogres. Of the one hand, the Con- 
servatives were represented as ' preying on the vitals of 
the land,' 'living on the blood and flesh of the poor man;' 
and on the other, the Liberals were said to be desirous of 
pulling down the Church and the Throne, and were 
' Jesuits in disguise,' who wished ' to shut up the Bible, 
and to banish religion from the land.' These are not 
fanciful but real assertions ; there was on the whole too 
much talk about the matter. Mr. Gladstone spoke some- 
thing like forty thousand words, that were reported by 
telegraph ; Mr. Bright nearly as many. We do not say 
that either of these eminent men used the phrases quoted, 
but we do say that they used too many words. ' Beware 
of the man of words ' is a Biblical proverb. ' Do you call 
that poatry,' Thackeray makes Jeames say, ' in your sea 
cap ting, with his eternal slack-jaw ? ' — ' I am sure that 
barrister is not speaking the truth ; he has got the losing 
side, he uses too many words,' said a simple juryman. 
In the multitude of counsellors there may be wisdom, but 
in the vast torrent of eloquent outpourings there is sure 



TOO MUCH TALK. 91 

to be folly ; and it is a fact that, exceptions being ex- 
cepted, the most voluble of nations are the most foolish, 
the most eloquent of men have the least sense. There is 
no proof that a man who can talk a horse's hind leg off 
will make a good statesman. Deeds, not words, are what 
Englishmen were wont to demand. 

The result of all this talk was shameful. It embittered 
man against man, party against party. Two delegates to 
Parliament, one the son of an earl, called each other re- 
spectively a sneak, a liar, a cur, and so on. In Ireland 
more than one man was shot, and voters had to exercise 
their right protected by soldiers and armed policeman. 
When some men went to vote, a mob came and carried 
them away. In short, such things were done in the 
British Isles as should cause us to hang our heads for 
shame. How can clear and solid judgment proceed from 
such delegated men ? Have we the best men ? has the 
appeal to the country produced any real working man 
candidate ? Do not all good and wise people see the ne- 
cessity of having working men in our National Assembly? 
and yet was not almost every election greatly biased, if 
not determined, by the quantity of money spent? A 
plague on both parties or on all parties — upon the whole 
spirit of party —if such is to be the result ! 

Of course, there is no one who has a belief in God and 
in right but knows that in the end right will conquer. 
We shall have a noble outcome in the far-distant future 



92 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

from all this turmoil ; but it is yet too early to ask women 
to vote. We must do away with open voting, and substi- 
tute voting papers (as they have done for the graduates 
of Oxford or Cambridge) before that day comes ; and 
meanwhile we must go on educating the people, and en- 
deavouring not only to raise every man and woman, but 
every child. We can at least educate them in silence and 
in patience ; as we are now, almost every one, without a 
thought wasted or spent about a matter, pronounced on 
it. Power is like fortune : all persons desire it, without 
knowing what to do with it ; whereas, both fortune and 
power are sacred things, which involve a man in respon- 
sible duties, from which he can by no manner of means 
escape or get free. 

We are here tempted to quote some of the noble sen- 
tences of John Ruskin, in his ' Letters to a Working Man ' 
(Mr. John Dixon, of Sunderland), which he quotes from 
his speech at the Working Men's College. The gist of 
his words is, before you get into Parliament, just know 
what you will get there for. ' Do you think,' he asks, ' it 
is only under the lacquered splendours of Westminster, 
you working men of England, that your affairs can be 
rationally talked over? You have perfect liberty and 
power to talk over and establish for yourselves whatever 
laws you please, so long as you do not interfere with 
other people's liberties or properties. Elect a parliament 
of your own. Choose the best men among you, the best 



. HUSKIES ADVICE. 93 

at least you can find. Invite trustworthy persons of other 
classes to join your councils ; appoint time and place for 
its stated sittings ; and let this Parliament, chosen after 
your own hearts, deliberate upon the possible modes of 
the regulation of industry and advisablest schemes for the 
helpful discipline of life ; and so lay before you the best 
laws they can devise, which such of you as were wise 
might submit to, and teach their children to obey. And 
if any of the laws thus determined seem to be inconsistent 
with the present circumstances or customs of trade, do 
not make a noise about them, nor try to enforce them 
suddenly on others, nor embroider them on flags, nor call 
meetings in the Park about them in spite of railings and 
police ; but keep them in your thoughts and sight, as 
objects of patient purpose and future achievement by 
peaceful strength.' 

Now this advice ought to be taken, and no doubt it will 
be. Any aid that we can personally give to it we will, 
for we love and honour the true worker, being, we hope, 
ourselves of that class, and we feel bound to aid him in 
this his day of defeat; for the working man has received 
a heavy blow and sore discouragement at the hands of all 
Britain. Not a working candidate succeeded : it was, 
perhaps, best that he should not, for, perhaps with one 
exception, there was not one fit representative : and 
the middle classes have been disgusted with such men as 
Finlen and Bradlaugh, who put themselves prominently 



94 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

forward as ideal working men. No class has been more 
disgusted and hurt, as we well know, than the workers 
themselves; therefore now is the time for their true 
friends to show them all sympathy and respect. While 
their delegates were making out that they were masters 
of the situation, and were so ridiculously upstart and 
'peacocky,' we felt it not right to speak to them, nor to 
cross them, having been sufficiently misunderstood. 
But now is the time ; and of a truth the future of England 
does depend upon the working man and his well-being. 
He did not by any means build, plan, and invent every- 
thing, but he did and does support -everything. It is' his 
industry that feeds us all. If we by far-reaching com- 
merce feed him, we rely upon his work to repay that 
commerce. And it is the duty of every influential writer 
to keep alive a spirit of loyal self-respect and independence, 
of sweetness and light, of nobility and grace, of emulation 
and ambition, in the working man and in his family ; and 
this we have humbly endeavoured to do, not, however, 
without some doubt and hesitation, for many a long year. 
He must therefore not be discouraged, and certainly not 
angered, by a temporary defeat. His time is coming, nay, 
now is, for it is always a good time for the active and 
the energetic worker. Many men are his friends j all 
parties court him; and truly he has the power in his 
hands, did he but know how to use it wisely. 

He must begin by recognising, as poets have done, in 



NOBLE LABOUR. 95 

eloquent prose or in rhyming cadences, the nobility of 
labour. Some writers believe that only one kind of 
labour is noble, and that other occupations are servile. 
It would be more true to say that some occupations are 
nobler in their aim than others ; but all work that tends 
to the comfort, help, clothing, sustenance, or elevation of 
our brothers is noble. 

Ay, labour is a noble thing, 

To work from morn till eve, 
To bend down o'er your shuttle, 

That your little ones may live. 

All such labour is noble. So, too, packing parcels, or 
weighing sugar, wherein a constant justice and truth is 
demanded, is noble, if rightly exercised. As for tailoring 
and shoemaking, these trades approach the arts. Let 
any man wear for a day or so an ill-made coat, or a pair 
of ill-made boots, and then ask himself whether he does 
not appreciate the true workman. House-building, boat 
and ship-building, lock-making, carpenters' and joiners' 
work, and such like, have long been recognised as some- 
thing elevated. No man is ashamed of being a good 
carpenter or smith; and there is an immense deal of 
pleasure in looking at and examining a deft workman 
handling his tools well, and producing good work. The 
pleasure he receives is great and very pure. ' Give me 
the man who sings at his work,' exclaims a wise writer. 
Ay, because the man who sings and takes delight in his 



96 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

work is a good workman, and if fairly rewarded, and of a 
prayerful, contented mind, is perhaps one of the happiest 
men in existence. The simplest work, honestly done, 
yields an immediate reward. Notice, you who live in 
the country, the satisfaction given to the ploughman by a 
straightly ploughed furrow; or that the labouring gardener 
has, not alone when his cloves and carnations in crimson 
fulness delight the eye with their colour, and load the 
morning air with their scent, but when he has trenched 
up the celery, or dug up the potato patch as it should be 
dug, and made the rich loam spread its brown and fertile 
surface to the sun. 

To give the workman his due, he feels all this ; being 
a sound, good man he must experience joy in work ; his 
only two troubles are that he gets, on the whole, too much 
work and too little pay. That is a very general com- 
plaint with us all : it is Adam's heritage and Eve's curse. 
We accept, and wisely, the necessity of work, without 
which this beautiful earth would itself be barren ; 
but we moan and complain, not without fierce heart- 
burnings, and sometimes much bloodshed, because the 
rewards of this world are so unjustly distributed. Ah, 
good friends, there is the trouble ! l Fortune gives too 
much to many, but enough to none,' says the proverb ; 
and probably no man, however rich, thinks he is ade- 
quately rewarded. But remember, the labourer is worthy 
of his hire ; he who withholds that proper hire from him 



TRUE RIGHTS OF MAN. 97 

is accursed; and in spite of the laws of supply and 
demand, and such perilous stuff, talked by political 
economists, who, for the most part, have been mate- 
rialists, and have had not the fear of God, nor the study 
of His laws before their eyes, we can easily see what the 
labourer's hire is. For giving to the world his assistance, 
honestly, in the lowest form of labour, he is entitled to 
demand healthy life, room to breathe, enough to eat, 
enough for his wife and children, and sufficient joy, re- 
laxation, and play, to keep him in proper health. For 
the better and more healthful the man, the more true 
labour the world gets from him ; and the better the 
labour, the more the world is benefited. It is plain that 
when a man in the highest class of labour writes a scien- 
tific treatise or a moral essay, he should bring his best 
learning and holiest thought to that purpose ; and the 
better the learning, the more holy the thought, the more 
the world benefits thereby. In certain labour, goodness, 
soundness, and honesty of work are a sine qua non, a 
condition which must be. The pin of the railway or 
carriage wheel must be of the best, or it breaks suddenly 
and causes death ; the chain-cable of the anchor, the 
anchor itself, must be good. You may mingle sawdust 
with spice, and cast and sell wooden nutmegs without 
loss of life ; but if you sell a sham ginger- bread anchor, 
and a ship is lost, you are a murderer. Now, in the 
Crimean War, the firms who supplied the soldiers sent 

H 



98 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

out putrid meat in patent (?) tins, and mouldy hay, with, 
in one case, a putrid lamb in a truss ; horses were starved 
by the hundred, and men died by the score. There was 
a cry, - Whom shall we hang ?' But none of those traders, 
around whose neck we would have put a rope with zeal, 
knowing that the nation thereby would have been taught 
the wisest lesson, were brought to justice. 

It is the dishonest greed for great gains, the dishonour- 
able competition amongst firms, which no co-operation 
will do away with, that produces short weight, rotten tins, 
bad junk, old ships made to go down, and so forth ; it is 
this that the workers must co-operate against in their 
Parliament. If it were allowable, and the Society for 
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would not interfere, it 
would be well if every baker who (purposely) gave short 
weight, or adulterated bread, had his ear nailed to his 
door-post. This dishonesty, this 'theft by false work,' as 
Mr. Ruskin calls it, is the most deadly to us all that can 
be. It cuts into the very vitals of the poor ; it gives bad 
beer and stimulants that madden and make drunk the 
worker ; it gives bad sour bread that does not nourish 
him, shoes that cripple and make him worse than bare 1 
foot, clothes that do not warm him. ' If you steal a 
hundred pounds of plate, like a brave burglar,' says Mr. 
Ruskin, ' a man knows his loss ; besides that, you take 
your risk of punishment like a man. And if you do it 
bravely and openly, and habitually live by such inroad, 



1HE SUCCESS OF 1Z0GUES. 99 

you may retain nearly every moral and manly virtue, and 
become a heroic rider, driver, and hero of song ; but if 
you swindle me out of twenty shillings in each hundred 
bargains, I lose my hundred pounds just the same ; I gee 
a hundred untrustworthy articles besides ; . . . and you, 
having done your thieving basely, are corrupted by the 
guilt of it to the very heart's core.' 

And what do you gain by this frightful dishonesty 
Money. A large firm of linendrapers, which has eaten 
up little firms, began in a large way, sold very cheap, and 
failed. Its creditors bore the brunt ; it began again, sold 
more cheaply, and failed again. Again the creditors 
suffered. It set up a third time, and then — having so 
dearly purchased a reputation for selling cheaply — made 
a huge fortune. Thy money perish with thee ! All the 
money that it has made will never buy back the disap- 
pointed hopes of creditors and workpeople. The dis- 
trust of those who lost, of those who honestly opposed 
it, and who were dishonestly beaten out of the market, 
the hatred engendered, the want of faith in Providence 
taught by the success of these rogues — are these nothing ? 
And what is gold worth ? ' Man wants but little here 
below/ if he knew it ; and if he practised that which he 
knew, still less. Two great evils threaten the workers, 
hunger and cold. Those staved off, he needs little ; and 
gold purchases very little worth having. ' Time is money, 
say your wealthy economists and practical merchants,' 
h 2 



ioo A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

cries Mr. Ruskin, in a bitter and solemn sermon. * None 
of them, however, I fancy, as they draw towards death, 
find that the reverse is true, and that money is time. 
But other things are money : health is money, wit is 
money, knowledge is money ; and all your health, and 
wit, and knowledge may be changed for gold, and the 
happy goal so reached of a sick, insane, and blind aurife- 
rous old age ; but the gold cannot be changed, in its 
turn, into health and wit.' 

It is worth little then; it is never worth dishonest 
getting or disquieting oneself in vain for. There is 
arising in the midst of us a proposition for clipping the 
vast overgrown estates and of using the money for edu- 
cational purposes. Some very serious questions have 
been debated by working men, and will again arise ; no 
one can blink them or pass them by. 



CHAPTER VIII. 
GOOD OUT OF EVIL. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Voltaire — Mandeville's ' Fable of the Bees' 1 — The Lisbon 
Earthquake — Poisonous Remedies — Voltaire's Head and Heart 
— Accidents not all Evil — Fate and Jupiter — Isaac Barrow — 
None without Trials. 




can be. 



■E have been, perhaps unhappily, born in a 
time when evil is openly acknowledged as a 
tremendous power, which it is ; and also fol- 
lowed as an end, which it is not and never 
Evil must be conquered, crushed, and sup- 
planted by good. This is the victory of life over death ; 
this takes the sting from the grave. But in this fervent, 
hasty, and too often unreflecting age there are those, as 
we shall prove by quotation, who worship evil for itself. 
The grandest and purest poet that England or the world 
ever produced, John Milton, with a retrospective pre- 
science, if we may use that phrase, makes Satan exclaim, 



io 4 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

i Evil, be thou my good ; ' and great writers who come 
after him, notably Voltaire, seem to us to adopt that awful 
creed. He does it with his usual cunning, and takes care 
to put his reasons in the lips of another. He is writing of 
' bees ' — a perfectly harmless subject one would think — 
quoting Mandeville's ' Fable of the Bees, or Public Vices, 
Private Benefits ; ' and thus he introduces the poison in 
the tail of his article, as the sting is in the tail of a bee : 

' Mandeville,' he says, ' goes a great way ; he pretends 
that bees could not live together in comfort, in a great 
and powerful hive, without many vices. No kingdom, no 
state, he says, can flourish without vices. Take away 
vanity from your great and rich ladies and you destroy 
your manufactures in silk ; no more workmen and work- 
women of a thousand different kinds ! — a great part of 
the nation would be brought down to beggary. Deprive 
your merchants of avarice, and the English fleets will 
disappear from the sea; take away envy from your 
artists and emulation will cease : we should fall back 
into ignorance and the grossness of barbarism.' 

This is so very specious— being, indeed, an expansion 
of Rochefoucault's maxim that all our vices are dis- 
guised virtues, and all our virtues vices in disguise — that a 
little further on Voltaire apologises for Mandeville, and 
adds : ' This is as much as to say that even our crimes are 
useful, in that they serve to establish a good government. 
A highwayman makes him who betrays him gain a good 



POISONOUS REMEDIES. 105 

deal of money ; nay, he benefits those who arrest him, 
the gaoler who guards him, the judge who condemns him, 
and the hangman who executes him. In fact, if we had 
no robbers, the men who forge fetters would die of 
hunger.' Yes, so they would ; only chains are found very 
useful for other matters than chaining prison doors or 
putting on men's legs. The man who forges an anchor 
and the smith who makes a cable are doing noble work. 
It is mere specious talk to say that one must live by 
vice. As Voltaire himself says, 'We make very good 
medicinal remedies from poisons ; but poisons are not 
exactly those things which nourish life (qui nous font 
vivre)' 

In thinking over this very difficult subject, we must 
bear in mind that Voltaire, a tender-hearted and, upon 
the whole, a just man, certainly a great one, never sur- 
vived the shock received from the earthquake of Lisbon, 
in which so many thousand persons were hurried out of 
this life into, as we hope, a better. If we knew as 
certainly as we know a mathematical problem, or the 
result of a sum in arithmetic, that the persons (many 
pious Roman Catholics) really benefited by their deaths, 
there would remain a ready solution of the question ; but 
Voltaire, who had a very tender heart, had also a sceptical 
and incredulous head. He did not think sufficiently 
well of humanity to suppose that so many thousands 
would be admitted en masse into heaven ; and the 



106 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

poverty, sickness, and plague that sprung up on the fall 
of Lisbon, the starving and crippled wretches that were 
buried in its ruins, the starvation which fell among its 
survivors, haunted him with a real pity and an indescrib- 
able terror. He had not that philosophy which faith can 
give. He was a man as well formed to believe that 
1 somehow good will be the final end of ill ' as any one j 
but the wretchedness of France, the misery of the poor, 
the callousness of the rich, the terrible vices, hard- 
heartedness, and folly of the Roman clergy, of whom 
Voltaire himself was one, made him ignore Christianity, 
and he was without hope as to a blessed future. When 
he writes of the soul, he doubts it — ' You might as well 
talk of the soul of a vegetable.' He sneers ; and there- 
fore, without compensation, the whole scheme of man, as 
far as he saw it, was a painful trial, a real tragedy, or a 
miserable farce ; the only way of passing through which 
was to ' grin ' in the Voltairean way, and 'bear it.' 

When man is looked upon in this sort of way, the pro- 
spect is miserable enough. If we shut our eyes, depend 
upon it we shall always be in the dark. The pious 
Greeks found life very hard to bear; and having in- 
vented a god to whom to cry — ' If there were no god,' 
said Robespierre, quoting Voltaire, ' a good government 
would invent one ' — they yet found that there were things 
at once so terrible and so mysterious that they could not 
reconcile them with the easy manly good-nature with 



SUPREMACY OF FATE. 107 

which they had endowed the cloud-compelling and 
thundering Zeus or Jupiter. Tis true he wielded the 
thunder and the lightning ; but the thunder often came 
at the wrong time, and the lightning too often struck the 
wrong man. To solve this difficulty, the ancients made 
Fate superior to Jupiter ; and Fate was a dreadful thing, 
to which gods and men equally submitted. Unless this 
fact is borne in mind it is impossible to appreciate the 
deep melancholy of the Greek tragedians. Orestes, 
knowing that his mother has slain his father, in obedience 
to Apollo slays his wicked mother, but is, nevertheless, 
haunted by Furies : 

My dark-soul'd mother, 
With wily art, in private murder' d him ; 
The bloody bath attested her foul deed ! 
I, then an exile, bending back my steps, 
Slew her that gave me birth : nor shall my tongue 
Deny the deed ; it was a vengeance due 
To my loved father's shade : so Phcebus deem'd, 
Who urged me, and denounced heart-rending woes 
Should I shrink back, refusing to avenge. 

Here, then, is a pretty dead-lock. If Orestes had not 
slain Clytemnestra — who, by the way, slew her husband 
for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia to the gods, as 
commanded by the priests — Apollo would have punished 
him. As he did so, the Furies haunted him and drove 
him to madness. There could be no comfort nor hope in 
such a religion as this ; on either hand was trouble. 



108 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Evil seemed to predominate ; the only outcome was a 
placid stoicism, which suffered without complaining, or a 
vulgar epicureanism, which enjoyed while it had life, and 
let the future, with its mournful terrors, take its chance. 

True philosophy has taught us to try to understand the 
ways of the Almighty, and to distinguish between good 
and evil. It is the first duty of the wise man, always the 
duty of every man, to do this : 

Awake, my St. John ! Leave all meaner things 
To low ambition and the pride of kings. 
Let us (since life can little more supply 
Than just to look about us, and to die) 
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man — 
A mighty maze ! but not without a plan. 

So sings Pope to his patron and his inspirer ; and it is 
just because it is 'not without a plan,' that we, who do 
comprehend the whole plan, are so cast down with evil. 
The great and wise Isaac Barrow has a good simile when 
he compares the ocean to God. Who can comprehend 
Him, yet, who being wise, would deny Him ? Simple, 
consistent, immutable, and illimitable, He is still before 
us, vast and incomprehensible. ' But,' asks Barrow, ' is 
the ocean less visible, because standing upon its shore 
we cannot descry its utmost limits ? ' And again : ' The 
more unlimited things are, the more correspondent they 
are to our limited faculties, no finite being beifig able to 
satisfy his large capacities. 1 



RIGHT AND WRONG. 109 

But these large capacities for good meet with cruel 
rebuffs when they seek to be completely satisfied. The 
good man who has expanded and become as an angel, 
loving his kind, is perplexed with constant evil. It rises 
with him in the morning ; it haunts his bed at night. He 
sees the saint led to the stake, and the villain promoted 
to office ; he finds the mean and the narrow successful, 
and the open-handed and generous in want — 

Right for ever on the scaffold ; wrong for ever on the throne. 

To him it is so easy and so pleasant to be good, that he 
wonders at the stupidity of the world. When at last he 
better understands the whole, he may happily distinguish ; 
but at present he is perplexed. Whether it be in St. 
Francois de Sales, or in a Kempis, or in John Wesley, 
the cry is the same, ' Why doth the wicked prosper ? ' 

It may, however, comfort us to reflect that all evils are 
not the same. A wise worldly man once told us that he 
had reduced all evils to two — hunger and cold. Let a 
man be well fed and warm, said this modem Epicurean, 
all things — shame, distress, anguish — may be borne, and 
borne easily. In his sense he is right. The evils of the 
world are to be divided ; many of them are trials, others 
simple evils, working out their way accursed, punishing 
and destroying as they go. 

The evils, commonly called evils, but merely trials, are 
poverty, shame, want of success, wars, tumults, famine, 



no A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

tempests, shipwrecks, blights, volcanoes, earthquakes, 
frosts, rebellions, revolutions, and generally those ope- 
rations of Nature which legal language defines to be the 
act of God. As for accidents resulting from man's 
carelessness or laziness, we should not look upon them 
as evils. They are reminders, more or less gentle, of our 
own follies, and they carry their lessons with them. One 
of these seldom happens without causing the avoidance 
of others. l The scalded cat,' says the French proverb, 
'dreads cold water.' If so, we may be sure that it is a 
good thing for the cat. Poverty, which is, and will 
always be, the great trial of the earth, is demonstrably a 
blessing in disguise. That the poorest lands, within 
reason, are best cultivated — that their people are the 
most energetic — that riches corrupt, and ease causes a 
nation to degenerate, are axioms so true that they become 
truisms. So with riches. A rich man without trials, 
troubles, and duties, is contemptible ; he is lower than a 
man. Luckily, we have very few of such men ; but still 
we have enough to prove our rule. 'If you want to 
know,' says Swift, in one of the truest and the bitterest 
things ever said, ' what God All-mighty thinks of riches, 
just look upon those upon whom He has bestowed most 
of them.' As for wars undertaken by the inquietude of 
the people ; wars which change the face of countries and 
give the lands of one monarch to another — which deso 
late and slay, kill, maim, and torture — it is an astonishing 



GOOD OUT OF EVIL. in 

thing to reckon up what we owe to them. The pain of 
them is transient, and hurts but momentarily a generation ; 
the benefit remains for years. Tumults and revolutions, 
rebellions and political commotions, hurt as they pass 
over us, but benefit us when they are gone. Why they 
should be at all, it is idle to ask. Man is certainly not in 
a world of passive enjoyment; and Revelation cannot be 
accused of ever deceiving man on that score. He is told 
that he is not to lay up his treasure on earth, ' where moth 
and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through 
and steal.' He is reminded that his life here is but a 
shadow. If governors will be corrupt, stupid and bad, 
the people will rebel. We have long gone beyond the 
belief in ' the right divine of kings to govern wrong.' It 
would seem that, with the British especially, nothing were 
so easy as to govern well : to seek the people's prosperity, 
to be surrounded by wise counsellors, to be active and 
energetic, is all we demand. Yet how many sovereigns 
have satisfied us in that way? To seek greatness by 
ambition, and to fall asleep in laziness and pleasure, 
seem to have been the two ends most sought after by 
our governors — notwithstanding some brilliant excep- 
tions. And yet all our troubles have hitherto only made 
us better. Without brag or exaggeration, this corner of 
the earth, this knuckle end of Europe, has been for a 
long time the wonder and envy of the world. 

Evils that are the act of God are becoming every day 



ii2 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

far better understood, and change their faces so much 
that they are regarded as blessings. The frost that slays 
the uncared-for lamb upon the mountains, and smites the 
careless traveller on the lonely road, kills thousands ot 
insects when their work is done, and renders the earth 
friable and fertile, so that man is blessed with abundance. 
The cold of Christmas acts with a sharp benevolence 
upon the energy of Spring, and the chemistry of Nature 
needs the rest and the pause. The tempest which tosses 
the fishing boat clears the air and purines the town ; the 
lightning which strikes the vessel has its mission of mercy, 
though it turned aside to kill. The earthquakes, so 
cruel in their results, are, we may depend, kind in their 
cruelty. As yet we see in part and know in part ; we 
have penetrated but the crust of the earth ; we know but 
little of its complicated machinery ; but we are beginning 
to trace the belt of subterranean fires, which are perhaps 
as necessary to our existence as the air which we breathe, 
and they and the sun produce. It is irrelevant to ask, 
why should there not be unmixed good, happiness with- 
out alloy, youth without age, pleasure without pain, 
sunshine without storm, perpetual day without inter- 
vening night, and eternal life without the rest of death ? 
To this question, irrelevant as well as irreverent there is 
but one answer : God willed it otherwise. This earth is 
not heaven. It is admirable as a place of trial ; its very 
imperfections are admired, though admitted to be stings 



GO OB OUT OF EVIL. 113 

and troubles. The modern philosopher, who the other 
day was insolent and irreverent enough to charge his 
Maker with being a bungling workman, because in His 
works there were variations, apparent (to us) in utilities 
and decay, is to be dismissed as being merely im- 
pertinent. Truly his charge is impertinens ; it doth not 
belong to the question. The uses of sickness and of 
bodily pain will be admitted by all who know life, and 
have felt both health and sickness. To the wise man 
these ' evils ' are but what the pious Catholics call them, 
' exercises/ 

They should exercise us for our good. In point of 
fact they do exercise all people for good. The best and 
kindest of us all, the most saint-like and the most fit to 
live with God — and we hope and trust that some have 
so fitted themselves — have borne pain, suffering, and 
sorrow, without repining. 

But beyond this, there are evils that come to no good, 
and are purely wicked. We have grown to be so sugar- 
sweet in this day of small things that more than one poet 
has pitied the Devil and condoned his offences. In the 
second part of ' Faust,' Goethe hints at his final forgive- 
ness ; Burns groans over his fate ; and Longfellow cries 

out — 

For even he — he is God's minister 

Existing for some good, by us not understood. 

It may be so ; we cannot debate the large question here ; 



ii4 



A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 



but if he is not to be understood he is to be withstood, to 
be avoided, to be abhorred and utterly cast out ; for 
cursed is he who worships evil for the pleasure it brings 
him, and who dares to say that it is good. 







CHAPTER IX 
ON CONFIDENCES AND SECRETS, 



I 2 



CHAPTER IX. 

Secrets illusive — Midas has Ears! — Public Confessors — Plu- 
tarch's Morals — The Athenian Mercury — Confession — The 
common Character of Sin. 




SECRET is one of those things which ought 
to convince us of the illusiveness of life, 
and the emptiness of human affairs. It 
exists only in name ; it is like echo, a 
sound, having no existence ; it appears to live ; nay, 
in its very death — that is, when it is told to a third party 
as a very great secret — it pretends to take a new lease of 
life. It is so evanescent, such a sham, that everybody 
tries to destroy it ; try to clasp it, and you clasp a bubble ; 
touch it, and it breaks. All experience, all life, all that 
we see and hear, confirms this. Talleyrand used to say 
that if a secret was known to more than two persons 
it never lasted three days, a fourth person was sure to 



n8 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

know it ; and the story of Midas — which our admirable 
English author, Mr. Hales, whom the French call 
D'Hele, put into a charming opera, which yet keeps the 
French stage — is but the antique version of the fall of 
secrets. 

In mythic ages, when the gods were supposed to visit 
the earth, Midas was king of a people of Thrace, and had 
so beautiful a garden that the god Silenus used to come 
down to it. Being made drunk by the strange expedient 
of pouring wine into a fountain, he revealed to Midas 
a secret concerning life. It is x not of so refreshing a 
nature that we need publish it ; nevertheless, we give it 
to our readers, since we, later livers in more golden days, 
with nobler lives before us, made holy by duty done, and 
beautiful from the sure hope of a blessed reward, can 
afford to laugh at it. This drunken Silenus told Midas, 
the king, the profound secret that ' life is most free from 
evil when we are ignorant of the future ; that it would 
have been better for man not to have been born at all ; 
nevertheless, being born, his greatest happiness is to die 
as soon as possible.' A cheerful secret that ! — an -out- 
come of faithless times, and much and far wandering 
from the true God. But Midas must have his secret, too. 
Having at a subsequent period well entertained Silenus, 
he obtained, through that god, from Bacchus his one sole 
wish — and that, of course, a foolish one — that all that he 
touched might turn to gold. Thoroughly was he cursed 



MIDAS. 119 

by the fruition of this wish, for the very river he bathed 
in, the Pactolus, ran over golden sands, and his food 
turned to unnourishing lumps of yellow dross. Like the 
leper he cried out, and received an order from the god to 
wash away his fatal gift : hence those Pactolean sands, of 
which modern poets have made so much use. 

Old fables (such as the above) are very beautiful, and 
have a mine of sweet wisdom in them when we ' observ- 
ingly distil it out' This same Midas, who must be 
meddling, distinguished himself afterwards by being the 
umpire in a musical contest between Pan, the god of 
rude nature, the shepherds, and the woods, and Apollo, 
the Sun-god, and especial god of Music. Of course 
the rude ears of this mortal Thracian king preferred the 
scrannel pipes of Pan, and his merry country airs, to the 
divine music of Apollo ; and he declared that Pan was 
the victor; whereupon the wrathful Apollo turned the 
ears of King Midas into asses' ears— a fit revenge for so 
stupid a critic ! But there are ways to hide even asses' 
ears, as our critics know, and King Midas concealed his 
from all but his personal attendant, who, bursting with 
the important secret, and not daring to tell it to any 
human being, dug a hole in the ground and whispered it 
therein ; but from the earth, thus fertilised, there grew a 
crop of reeds, which nightly whispered to the Summer 
wind, ' Midas has asses' ears ! ' Such was the secret of 
Midas. 



i2o A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

The fact is, there is no keeping a secret, even if it 
concerns oneself. There is a necessity for a confidant to 
whom we can confide something that lies close about 
our bosom. There are few persons in the world who are 
entitled to say this with more certainty than clergymen 
and clerical editors, to whom are entrusted every week 
secrets ordinary and extraordinary, from crimes of the 
deepest dye to little peccadilloes at which the purest 
innocence only is abashed. These confidences are made 
by people of all ranks, and from all the civilised parts 
of the globe, and from their number and nature never 
can be, and never are revealed. A line in print, an 
indication where to find consolation or succour, or in 
what way to retrace incautious steps, directed to simple 
initials or an assumed name, catches the eye of the con- 
fessor at breakfast, and may make the heart beat quicker ; 
but no one else knows it, and no one can act upon the 
confession, while hundreds who intuitively read why the 
advice was given, can act upon the advice. Although 
these questions, confessions, and confidences are now 
confined to the cheap magazines, the number who take 
advantage of such — persons of fair education — is very 
large, and betokens a human want. Being human it is 
ancient. In Plutarch's Moralia questions are debated 
that are not settled yet, and if some of the confessions in 
Addison's ' Spectator ' were manufactured, there can be 
little doubt that many, and those the most startling, were 






THE MERCURY, 121 

true. As the ' Saturday Review ' says, they cannot all 
have been invented. 

It is more than 150 years since similar questions and 
answers were published under the direction of John 
Dunton, a somewhat eccentric bookseller, as the 
'Athenian Mercury'* (republished in 1728 as the 
'Athenian Oracle'), and in those answers may be ob- 
served matters touching religion and morals. But, as 
the Laureate tells us : 

No being on this earthly ball 
Is like another all in all : 

so certainly no journal or periodical is the exact counter- 
part of another. Half of the successors of the ' Mercury ' 
seem to have failed for want of earnestness, many from 
want of ability; others, with plenty of ability, from a 
notion that the proper way to amuse A, B, and C, was 
to make fun of D, E, and F, forgetting that one man's 
mind is very much a counterpart of another's. It is 
now found that, laying aside the petty temptation to 
laugh at the simplicity of some questions, the plain and 
best wa.y is to answer all seriously. A wise answer may 
be given to a very foolish question. The heart recognises 
the sincerity of the head ; and this is the secret of speak- 
ing to the heart. 

The world cannot do without confession in some way. 

* ' The Athenian Mercury, or a Scheme to Answer a Series of 
Questions Monthly, the Querist remaining Concealed.' 



122 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Cunning men have taken advantage of this, and added 
another link to the great long chain by which they bind 
men. Confession seems to some to imply absolution : 
it does no such thing. A true Christian, before he 
commits a crime, is already absolved ; and God, who 
sees the fall, knows when to raise the weakling and to 
comfort him with hope. But without referring to 
the practice of private confession, as urged on the 
patient by some religions — a bad and misdirecting 
practice, we believe — we may urge that the confessional 
must have a very disheartening and bad effect upon the 
priest. Father Gavazzi once likened the bosom of the 
holy man, who sits in a little box, and puts his ear to 
the grated opening where the penitent kneels, to the 
Thames before its purification, which had all the pollu- 
tions and filth of the sewers poured into it. How could 
such a man believe in goodness ? The demure maiden 
who knelt before him had to tell of some dreadful and 
secret sin ; the pious father, of some unholy plot for 
pleasure or for gain ; the chaste and excelling matron, 
beloved, admired, wondered at for her goodness, of some 
folly or some crime, we may well believe. It is wisely 
done in the Church of Rome that, for the most part, the 
priest and the penitent know little of each other, or else ! 
— the prospect is not pleasant. Another reflection which 
somewhat comforts us is this : that the crimes of man 
are, like the keys in a piano, by no means infinite. You 



CONFESSION. 123 

can get certain tones out of them, and no more ; you 
may have many deficiencies and multitudinous combina- 
tions. But, after all, few men are original in their vices. 
We envy, we hate, we backbite, we steal, we lust, we 
murder, and we combine these and their various modifi- 
cations in many ways. One man is honourable, excellent, 
admirable, but for a besetting sin ; in this sin he slips, 
then repents, and slips again and again. The confessors 
know all this. The very tone and tint of every sin is 
marked down in Peter Dens and Sanchez, and marked 
and priced in the confessional; for it yields a good 
revenue, as the Cenci said on one notable occasion. 

In Protestant countries our confessors are our friends, 
our advisers, or, best of all, the Almighty, as the old 
anti-Roman set of verses, written long years ago, said : 

He's able to confess, and always willing ; 
To Him will I confess — and save my shilling. 

But there are very few people who do not seek some 
sympathising soul to pour into it their troubles, trials, 
follies, and virtues. The reason why lovers are so fond 
of each other's company is that they confess to each 
other, talk about themselves. Annie tells William what 
mamma and papa said about him, or someone else, or 
how someone blamed somebody, and how Annie thought 
differently. Then comes the feeling which is properly 
simpatica. William thinks as Annie thinks, and Annie 



i2 4 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

thinks as he thinks. Their very confessions are half 
praises of themselves : ' Do you know I'm such a pas- 
sionate creature, but ' ; and then comes the sweeter 

confession, ' I'm very jealous of those I love ; but then 

/ And as one thinks, so does the other ; and quite 

right too. It is hard indeed in this hard world if two 
cannot be in perfect confidence ; but it is doubtful 
whether many are really so. Does every lover know all 
that his mistress has done before he met her ? Many 
lovers are like the roguish fellow in Boccaccio's story, 
who, after a life of debauchery, vowed that he would die 
in the odour of sanctity. He therefore sent for a simple 
monk, and confessed that he had committed the greatest 
crime in the world, that nothing could cleanse him, and 
he wept and howled pitiably. The good monk tried in 
vain to pacify him, and to make him particularise the 
crime, but in vain ; half the monastery tried, but with as 
little success. At last, just before he died, he confessed 
to the bishop — no smaller priest would serve — that he 
had once, when a boy, disobeyed his mother, and as a 
grey-haired man he still repented it. ' Is this all ? ' cried 
the bishop. - All ! ' gasped the penitent ; ' is it not 
enough ? ' And after receiving the sacrament, he died. 
' If this be all his sins,' said the simple priests, ' he was 
the finest saint in the world ; ' so they carried his body 
to the church, worked miracles at his tomb, and in due 
time had him canonised. Such is the Italian's wicked 






HOUSEHOLD SECRETS. 125 

story. How many of us confess to peccadilloes to escape 
the imputation of greater sins? 

Lawyers, doctors, clergymen, servants, see a great deal 
of many households and hear a great many secrets ; that 
is, they find that most of their patients are fallible, and 
that in many a family there is a Blue-beard cupboard, in 
which there is a skeleton. We are quite ready to confess 
that some of these skeletons are very small. A, who is 
a prosperous man, is terrified with the secret that some 
five-and-twenty years ago his wife and he were glad to 
let their first floor ; Mrs. B is terrified because her maid 
may discover that she wears that useful article a false 
tooth; but D, and H, and K, have graver secrets; one's son 
has been dishonest, or one's father a fraudulent bankrupt, 
and so on. Now these are secrets which no one need 
proclaim on the house-top, but they are not such as to 
make us despair or be very unhappy. Whatever is out 
of our own power need not grieve us, the birth mark on the 
back of B's neck, or the mark of shame upon C's birth, 
Heaven knows, neither could help. If we could choose 
our birth there would be more noblemen born than 
peasants ; but that happily is beyond our control : as 
they say in a quaint country phrase of a man with an 
ugly proboscis, ' He was not behind the door when noses 
were given away.' We can only treat persons thus 
afflicted with greater consideration ; for themselves, their 
comfort must be that their secret shame is imaginary and 



126 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

temporary. Any folly of our own, hours and money mis- 
spent, disgrace, debt, dishonour, we may well be ashamed 
of, but if we even let any such secret escape, it is a 
blessing to know that gossips hear and forget it. The 
wise man knows that everyone is fallible and that he 
himself might fall. The fool's opinion is worth little; 
his bolt is soon shot, and seldom hits the mark. 

It is wise, where possible, to look a secret in the face, 
and to pluck the heart out of the mystery by having it 
out. Half the Court tattle and rare secrets of great 
people and fashionable life resolve themselves into or- 
dinary follies and sins, and sometimes amount not even 
to so much. ' Secret Memoirs of Lady Dash, Bedchamber- 
Woman to Princess Blank ' are advertised every ten years 
or so ; and what balderdash they are ! The biggest secret 
is like that great thing in the ' Vicar of Wakefield,' where 
one of the Court ladies assures the company that 'my lord 
duke cried out three times to his valet de ckambre, "Jerni- 
gan, Jernigan, bring me my garters ! " ' The book is sold, 
and so are its readers. Wiser it is, rather than to build 
up a mystery, not to have any at all. Let everybody 
know what you give for your wine or your mutton, if you 
pay an honest price ; let the world shout it out that your 
two o'clock meal — which, by the way, all great people 
take, and at the same hour — is a dinner, and not a 
lunch ; let C know that your brougham is hired, or that 
you keep only one servant. Why not ? C can know, if 



FALSE SECRETS. 127 

he likes ; openness defeats the tittle-tattle of the street or 
village. ' What, Sydney, carrying a parcel ! ' cried In- 
quisitive to a good clergyman. ' Yes ; and there's a 
couple of rabbits in it, that I've bought for dinner. Can 
you sell me any onions ? ' Alderman Flower heard so 
many people whisper about him that he had been a 
porter, that he put his porter's knot in a glass-case in his 
hall ! So our old knights, from whom we are so proud 
to descend, bore water-bougets, mill-rinds, combs with 
hair, golden pills, and other heraldic charges on their 
shields, to denote descent from the water-carrier, the 
miller, the barber, or the doctor. They were too wise to 
blink, or to try to hide the most honourable portion of 
their career, its rise and progress. 

There are many events in life which people conceal, 
which grow into secrets which haunt and plague them 
through life ; but which yet are not secrets at all. In the 
first place they are known to a dozen people as well as to 
the chief actor in them, just as the most private matter of 
the Tichborne family was known to the groom or the 
governess ; and in the second, if they are unknown, they 
are natural weaknesses, about which there need be no 
concealment whatever. Thus many a family has all its 
life been troubled by a sham piece of guilt, a supposititious 
stain. Poor human nature, haunted not only by her real 
sins, follies, shames, and sorrows, but by the ghosts of 
these. As we have false pride, so we have false sorrows : 



128 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

as we have matters we wisely conceal, so we often blush 
at and hide those which may truly do us honour. 

For real secrets choose discreet confidants; for sins, 
some wise and pious minister, to whom such confession 
will not be strange, or some one to whose clear judgment 
your burden will yield. Children should be taught in 
such revelations, which are all too seldom made, to rely 
upon parents — married people upon each other. A fault 
confessed is one-half pardoned ; and many a misery is 
healed when, with an honest determination to amend, 
we ' cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff ' 
that preys upon the conscience. 




CHAPTER X. 

OF THE USE OF WORDS. 



CHAPTER X. 




Modern Fun — Quiet Writers — The Use of Superlatives — 
Quintilian — Cobbett — Simplicity — Comparison — Comic 
Singers — Unreality of the Stage — Bombast to be avoided. 

[OW to speak well and to express oneself 
justly should be the concern of each of 
us, and of all as well as of each, although 
the nonsense which protrudes itself into 
our magazines under the name of light literature, wherein 
all the fun consists in bad spelling, or in exaggerated 
expression, would seem to be a standing denial of the 
existence, or at least the general existence, of the desire. 
It is a fact, however, that to a vast number of people the 
literature (?) provided by Mr. Barney Guffaw, Mr. Joe 
Grinnings, and the much more refined and humorous 
Mrs. Brown, is not considered entertaining, and that 
many gentlemen and ladies really derive more pleasure 

K 2 



i 3 2 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

from calm, quiet, and contemplative writing, which con- 
veys the writer's thoughts for just so much as they are 
worth, and no more, than from the ecstatic ravings of 
the spasmodic or sensational school. With such calm 
readers and critics, any expression which oversteps the 
modesty of nature is, in an author, just as objectionable 
as ranting in an actor, or as the most strained and mus- 
cular drawing — wherein the biceps is as big as a French 
roll and the veins like whipcord — of a young and vigorous 
artist who has just commenced his not unamusing career. 
While many scholarly people like scholarly writing, 
there is a majority which prefer high seasoning and 
literary dishes with a flavour. There are writers, too, 
who, like cooks, are certainly too free with the pepper- 
box. In their simplicity they call this vigour. Their 
heroes are very heroic, and their villains decidedly vil- 
lainous ; their foes are soundly belaboured, and their 
friends as warmly praised. They live as if Prince 
Rupert had never existed, and the mezzotinto, or the 
secret of giving a middle tint, were an unknown art ; and, 
sometimes, in virulent abuse, they seem ready to empty 
the. slang dictionary ; while, at others, in a laudatory way, 
all the beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount are in- 
sufficient for the object of their adulation. Every man 
must have some favourite method of ruining himself; 
' some men to business ' — on the Stock Exchange, let us 
say — ' some to pleasure take ; ' but most of our vigorous 



ADJECTIVES. 133 

and slashing young writers take to adjectives. They, 
wishing to ' pile up the agony,' become careless of their 
positives, regardless of their comparatives, and profuse — 
nay, reckless — of their superlatives. Now the adjective 
is a difficult part of speech. Sir John Stoddart, in his 
' Universal Grammar,' calls it the w^/j-adjective ; while 
Mr. Tooke places a large number of them among the 
participles, ' treating,' says a grammarian, ' all his prede- 
cesssors with contempt.' Sydney Smith told a story of a 
man who 'spoke disrespectfully of the equator.' So 
Home Tooke seems to have horrified many grammarians 
by his curt treatment of adjectives. ' Pray, sir, take care 
of your adjectives,' said Dr. Johnson. ' Boy ! ' thundered 
old Bowyer, ' mind your degrees.' The advice should 
never be thrown away. Vossius objected to the positive 
degree, because," said he, ' the other degrees are equally 
positive, that is, lay down their respective signification.' 
' Lastly,' says Stoddart, c the word superlative is not well 
chosen, since it merely shows preference, or raising one 
thing above another \ and in this sense the comparative 
is itself a superlative.' Quintilian calls the positive the 
absolute; others the simple. But enough has been said 
to show that adjectives, whether in a high or a low 
degree, are difficult words, and, therefore, to be used 
cautiously. They may not have the dangerous power of 
utterly confusing your reader, as an ill-used pronoun 
does, and of making him hesitate as to who is guilty or 



i 3 4 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

who is innocent when one is narrating a crime ; they do 
not confuse the number and person as does a verb if 
plural where it should be singular, or vice versa; their 
misuse is not so glaring, and therefore it is more fre- 
quent and more dangerous. Hume says that * the 
principles of the Reformation were deeper in the prince's 
mind than to be easily eradicated.' i This is no com- 
parison at all,' cried Cobbett, 'it is nonsense.' 

It is hardly in the use of comparatives that we sin now. 
We often are silly enough in our positive degree ; and, 
as Cobbett pointed out long ago, we say very right, very 
wrong, prodigiously honest, extremely just, or awfully 
comic ! 

We try to strengthen a simple word, and make non- 
sense of it. A man cannot be more just than just, or 
more honest than honest ; but in endeavouring to convey 
more than we really mean, we shoot beyond the mark. 
There has grown up with us of late a greediness for big 
words — a love of vastness and exaggeration. We have 
big houses, big ships, big firms, vast cataracts, and won- 
derful things of all kinds. An American, to whom the 
atmosphere of vastness had become a necessity, once 
astonished his audience by declaring that he could jump 
higher, squat lower, dive deeper, and come out drier, 
than anyone else. In fact, he was not to be exceeded. 
Such wild expressions encourage the young in the ten- 
dency, which exists in all fresh minds, towards habitual 



STRANGE COMPARISONS. 135 

untruth. One step over the boundary is dangerous ; yet 
readers of fine writers are continually urged to take that 
step. Shakspere, when Hamlet's mind seems to be for 
the moment failing, makes him rave about heaping 
' Pelion on Ossa/ and scorching the mountain's head 
against the sun ; when, however, Hamlet is sane his 
words are calmer, he calls himself ' a very slave.' This 
does not suffice our lady writers ; they fly to superlatives. 
' He grew,' one tells us, ' the veriest slave of the lovely 
vision.' To call a woman a vision is bold; to compare 
very, verier, veriest, is more daring. Shakspere, how- 
ever, can be cited as using a double superlative, but 
always with judgment ; and the Prayer Book says the 
' Most Highest,' and the Gospel doth deny the King to 
be the ' Supreme Head.' To justify that expression one 
might cite the Latin summa jus — as if there could be 
a lower and a higher head, and the true right could be 
compared, or there could be two rights. 

This extra-strong assertion seems to us indicative of 
weakness. In Colley Cibber's days the young beaux, to 
be more expressive, invented wild oaths, such as ' Stab 
my vitals,' ' Burn my liver,' ' Scorch me : ' so the Yankees 
talk of ' Eternal smash,' c Eternal and everlastin' per- 
dition,' and Mr. Edmund Sparkler exhausts his small 
vocabulary in asserting a young lady to be a ' Bigod-fine- 
woman \ ' and thus popular writers are no doubt 
delighted in appealing to large audiences. The ordinary 



136 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

method of flattery in appealing to an editor is to speak 
of his widely circulated paper, his vast body of readers. 
But is not this after all covert satire ? Do not the wisest 
writers contemn the mob and the applause of the many- 
headed. If great books are great evils, are not widely 
circulated papers so in another sense ? 

This striving at vastness produces wonderful results on 
public singers and actors. We have the great Dash ; the 
inimitable Blank. One man is the ' Hero Songster,' 
another the ' Lion Comique.' The side-splitting, face- 
tearing, convulsion-making Irish singers exhaust all 
epithets upon themselves in the endeavour to be original, 
like that actor that advertised his bespeak upside down, 
under the pretence that if he did not do so his benefit 
would have turned out a malefit. That a farce should be 
a ' roaring ' farce, and that the audience, probably dis- 
gusted at its folly, should roar at it like so many bulls of 
Bashan, was long ago an accepted fact. One theatre, 
however, goes beyond roaring in these dramatic trifles, it 

produces ' screamers ; ' a ' regular screamer ' is the 

recognised formula wherein a mild composition, which 
sends home the audience sadder and wiser men, medi- 
tative on the follies of farce writers, is announced. 

* It being a recognised fact,' says Mr. Dickens, dis- 
coursing of Mr. Crummies, ' that no British audience will 
ever come to a theatre unless it is fully persuaded that it 
cannot get in,' one is not surprised at such notices as 



THE STAGE UNREAL. 137 

' overflowing houses, no standing room in the pit, glorious 
galleries, and bursting boxes ' — these are the eccentricities 
to be caught like the measles, in the midst of a sanguine 
and over-hopeful class, the votaries of which prefer tights 
and spangles, rouge, feathers, and burnt cork, with a 
doubtful salary of 30^. a week, to the more prosaic, dull 
work, and infinitely more comfortable life, which would 
yield them five times as much. A few plaudits, probably 
from paid palms, the rap of an umbrella, and the yell of 
one boy in the gallery, has been described before now as 
' thunders of applause,' and has sent more than one rival 
actor with jealousy to his bed. So Miss Petowker, of 
T. R. D., describes the fall of a single bouquet, bought for 
the purpose by herself, and flung by the walking gentle- 
man, with a paper shirt-front and Berlin gloves, from the 
stage box, as an ' avalanche of flowers/ and the manager 
improves the occasion by calling in half a dozen soldiers 
off duty, and describing them as an 'army of super- 
numeraries.' The stage is itself an unreality; its 
expressions, like its simulated feasts and unreal viands, 
its fruits of coloured paper, and its pies of pasteboard, 
are vast, but empty. We may, therefore, pardon its 
exaggerations, but, in real life, we may be sure that no 
scholar or gentleman will willingly exaggerate or speak 
beyond the truth. The first step in that way is dangerous, 
it is more than a crime in society ; it is a blunder. To 
talk of being immensely funny, prodigiously pleased, 



138 



A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 



excessively and beyond expression annoyed, all the while 
you are expressing your chagrin ; to speak of such a 
scene being ' wofully comic/ and a picnic passing off in 
a way that was ' awfully jolly,' is superlatively nonsensical, 
if nothing else. No sane man wishes to speak a mere 
argot, a slang which, to the uninitiated, is as incompre- 
hensible as the unknown tongue. Language may have 
been given, as the bitter satirist said, to conceal men's 
thoughts, but not in that way. Big, bombastic, and 
swelling words, without thoughts^ to agree with them, are 
as ridiculous as the titles assumed by the pauper lunatics 
in Hanwell, and are often used by those who have not 
the excuse of madness. Every sensible gentleman will 
wish to avoid such folly ; and, to secure himself against 
the risk of these and like errors, he cannot do better than 
study the full meaning, value, and weight of every word 
he employs. 




CHAPTER XI. 

AWKWARDNESS. 



CHAPTER XI 

English Artists and Art — Chic — Lord Chesterfield — The 
English accused of Want of Geist — Mr. Arnold— Art in 
Silver — Gerome — Meissonnier — English Landscape — Want 
of London Management. 

t N one of the late foreign exhibitions, English 
artists, who made a very fair show, came off 
with only one of many gold medals, and 
were consoled in their failure by being told 
that their productions were not chic. This piece of slang 
was not ' understanded of the common people ' who live 
in Tyburnia and Belgravia, but has been for some years 
in vogue with the artists and students of Paris and their 
companions. It has travelled from the Quartier Breda 
to the Boulevards, and it is now widely used by the 
artist class, which comprehends those who write as well 
as paint in England. That we are not { chic ' needs 




142 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

scarcely to be said. The accusation that English ladies 
have five thumbs, instead of one and four fingers, has the 
merit of having been preferred by the politest nation in 
the world, and of being at least as old as the days of 
Rochefoucauld. Lord Chesterfield cites against his 
countrymen the charges of awkwardness and mauvaise 
honte, which he wishes his son, by means of a Continental 
education, to be free from. Actually, therefore, he wishes 
him to be ' chic/ much as his lordship detested slang. 
What does this mysterious expression mean ? The boys of 
Paris use it, and the artists still find it handy to express 
the inexpressible. It means really what we would 
intimate by ' skill or knack.' ' II y a du chic dans ce 
tableau/ there is power, worth, expression in that picture ; 
or they may say of an actor, ' Cet artiste a du chic/ that 
tragedian has stuff in him. Moreover, the little word 
pronounced sharply ' shik/ can be used very forcibly to 
express contempt. A dame du comptoir, asking a young 
fellow with a fine massive gold watch-chain what o'clock 
it was, saw, when he produced his timepiece, a miserable 
Geneva silver watch ; ' Ah ! ' she cried, ' ce n'est pas 
chic ! ' The externals did not imply internals ; and 
similarly to certain careless, thoughtless, blundering work, 
to ungainly awkwardness, to listless endeavour which 
never compasses its end, we may hear that it is not chic ! 
Mr. Arnold found that the Germans accused the 
English of a want of ' geist ' — spirit, mind, pluck, or really 



ENGLISH ART. 143 

chic. The accusation coming from both nations, from 
the thoughtful German and the vivacious Frenchman, 
may well make us pause. Is it true ? Is there no foun- 
dation for the assertion ? So much as a man loves this 
great country, so much as he appreciates her many noble 
and admirable qualities, her real virtues and her earnest 
endeavours, he will be pained, when comparing — and the 
comparison will be constantly forced on him — to find 
in almost everything a real want of grist or chic, or 
prompt, compact, educated and active thought in 
politics, in art, and in literature. We outlive our 
blunders, it is true ; but surely we cannot claim sufficient 
prescience or spirit to avoid falling into them. In the 
Exposition referred to England bore her part, but it was 
not the foremost part she once bore. An ordinary show 
of English pictures and a motley assembly of provincial 
papers was surely no great claim to the possession of the 
coveted quality. We ought to have known what we are 
about, and to have excelled in other things than china 
and cut glass. Certainly we had a curious collection of 
all the silver race cups won since 1854, huge piles of 
inartistic metal with no ' chic ' about them, and we 
had certain engines and machines which the French 
equalled and the Belgians surpassed. Our very best 
work is in the Government shed, where Palliser's chilled 
shot, and Armstrong's breech-loading cannon astonish 
the French by the crushing results exhibited on the 



144 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

'Warrior' targets and the sides of armour-clads; but 
people do say that it showed no very great ' chic ' to 
exhibit at a glance the carefully-tabulated results of years 
of the most costly experiments, and to teach possibly 
hostile nations the best and shortest method of battering 
our sea and land defences to pieces. Is it the thing — is 
it ' chic ' — to show a rival one's hand at cards ? 

As regards art, the want of this quality is certainly 
apparent with us. In good French pictures there is 
compact thought, power, good execution, and everything 
that culture and learning can do. The French painter 
knows the alphabet of his art at least, and if he fails, it 
is only for want of genius. But very many English 
painters exhibit a waste of genius for want of thorough 
art teaching. One shows us a number of people, cut 
into bits by the frame of the picture, crawling down the 
side of a ship ; another, huge figures covering the whole 
canvas in native ugliness at a pit's mouth. No wonder 
that French judges, accustomed to clean, careful, elegant 
work, overlooked the eccentricities of pre-Raphaelite 
genius. If we want to know why they do so, and dis- 
regard, as gentlemen, the stupid cries of favouritism we 
have only to look at the ' Chic,' of Gerome and Meis- 
sonier, and the want of all this in all except a few of our 
artists. Let us look too, for instance, at our pre-Ra- 
phaelite art in woodcuts, which invades even our carica- 
tures, our tall figures, bewhiskered and listless swells, our 



PAINTERS. 145 

coats, gowns, and trousers filling up the whole of the 
pictures ; the ragged work, black patches, pen-and-ink 
skies, woolly trees, rude and German-like cross-hatchings, 
and the utter want of finish which is observable in every 
illustrated book which we now see. 

Compare the old landscapes of Birket Foster, who has 
abandoned the wood, and the figure illustrations of John 
Leech and John Gilbert, with our present woodcuts. 

True art is nature to advantage dressed, 

is an incontrovertible maxim, and yet we dress our 
figures to such disadvantage that a picture of a workman 
or a sportsman is pervaded, not with the notion of a man, 
not with the character of an individual, but with an un- 
mistakable velveteen jacket or a pair of corduroy trousers 
in which you can count the very lines. Moreover, ugly 
as this exaggeration is, it is not more false than it is, 
ugly. Figures of the size of woodcuts would lose all 
especial texture of their dress ; and yet our thoughtless 
artists, because they see grain in the wood of a door 
seven feet high, run a false imitation of it over its simili- 
tude which is only two inches. The same blundering 
attempt to do something without the requisite thought of 
how it should be done pervades, let us sadly own, most 
things English. Let us pass from this art to architecture ; 
let us look at our streets, leading nowhere, the side streets 
blocked up so as to overload the arteries of trade ; the 

L 



146 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

houses built of rough stone, so as to be overloaded with 
soot ; the streets badly paved, with interstices so left that 
the mud can work up in wet weather, and the dust 
arise in the dry. Let us see how we mend the streets by 
fits and starts, first letting them be full of holes ; how we 
allow the turncock to pick up a portion and leave a 
hillock of stones improperly laid, which, just as it gets 
worn down, is peremptorily pulled up by the gas-man ; 
how we allow nuisances to accumulate ; permit railroads 
to knock down and leave in ruins whole quarters of the 
town; make no provision for lodging our working 
classes, when such provision would render them healthy 
and contented, and pay the parish as well ; how acres on 
acres of valuable land in the City have been for years a 
desert haunted by night by thieves and bad people, and 
by day by crowds of betting-men equally bad ; how we 
look in vain for a head, and never do anything but make 
a job ; how artists design law courts, which should be 
plain — noble, not costly in design — with a perfect forest of 
small towers and a useless central tower fit only for the 
minster bells of a Gothic cathedral, a paradise for sparrows, 
a trap for soot and smoke ; how other artists fail utterly 
in producing even a creditable design for a National Gallery; 
how 'the finest site in Europe,' Trafalgar Square, has 
become a stony desert, the playground of roughs — but 
there is enough to consider to make us sadly own that 
we want both Geist and Chic, and the first thing to 
remedy that want is to acknowledge it. 



CHAPTER XII. 

SATIRE. ITS USE AND ABUSE. 



CHAPTER XII. 




A Great Want — Truth a Libel — Vulgar Satirists — The Bon 
Ton — Swift— Hogarth — Modern Satire — Thackeray. 

VERY thoughtful and learned writer, who 
has changed this world for another, told 
his audience that one of the great wants 
of the age was Satire. That had gone out, 
he said, with the imposition of the law of libel. A libel 
is anything calculated to give pain, and the truth must 
be a libel because it certainly must pain many persons 
of whom it is spoken. 

On the other hand, Pope's doctrine that, ' Take it as 
a rule, no creature smarts so little as a fool ' is quite true, 
but, how libellous would Pope have been found in these 
days ! the persons whom satire hits are not fools but 
persons of acute perception and bad taste, who are led 
to do wrong because they see it done by persons of 
fashion. 



150 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Now, although English literature may be presumed to 
have reached that state indicated by the Roman poet, 
when he said ' that it was difficult not to write satire,' for 
literature is, after all, but a reflex of society, and surely 
society demands a purge, and requires an occasional 
satire, as sharp and pungent as it can be made. We 
have, however, passed, long ago, that early stage of 
satiric genius which produced such rude and raw ex- 
ponents of the art as Donne and Oldham, who may, in 
literature, stand as parallel examples, as in the newspaper 
press the ' Age ' and ' Argus,' the ' Censor ' and the 
' Satirist,' or, more lately still, those heavy and intense 
articles, which, from the pen of Mr. Douglas Jerrold, 
threw such a lurid light upon the first and middle pages 
of his weekly newspaper. Doubtless there is a public 
which still appreciates the mental food, as there is 
another public which demands something hot and sting- 
ing in what it eats, and something ardent and acrid in 
its drink. But the better class have grown into better 
tastes, and we wonder at the state of society which could 
have produced fools enough to patronise Mr. Barnard 
Gregory, the facile princeps of the '^Satirist,' and could 
have found amusement in the scandalous paragraph which 

acquainted the world of the fact of the * Duke of A 

being seen riding with a chambermaid in his chariot,' or 
the ' Earl of C enticing the wife of one of his sub- 
alterns into the barrack mess-room.' Still more do we 



VULGAR SATIRISTS. 151 

wonder at the greasy satisfaction with which the * Editor ' 
penned the words, ' Our eye is on the delinquents,' and 
at the cowardice of those delinquents in subsidising the 
' Editor ' in order to keep their names out of the paper. 
The success of these enterprises produced imitations in 
the inferior walks of life. Even in lowest depths there 
were found deeper still. The ' Town ' and ' Paul Pry ' 
and ' Penny Satirist ■ did for greengrocers and butchers 
what the 'Age' and 'Satirist' performed for baronets 

and earls. ' Joe S , or little black-whiskered Jack,' 

were advised not to talk so much to the barmaid ; or ' to 
give over paying visits to the tommy-shop,' ' or Paul ' 
would again be at them ; so that what with the ' eye ' of 
the ' Satirist,' and the muddy umbrella of ' Paul Pry, 1 
society, high and low, must have been kept in a state of 
chronic ferment. We may be sure that some of this mud 
stuck. Indeed, the satirists themselves were but bad 
imitations of the ' Bon Ton ' and ' Town and Country ' 
magazines ; and searchers in contemporary history will 
find it difficult to distinguish between the false and true, 
in reading some of the tete-a-tetes of the latter, such as . 
those between the Rev. W. Whitfield and the subtle 
sinner, and Jemmy Twitcher (Earl of Sandwich) and 
Miss R(eay). 

Satire now-a-days does not walk so much in the mud, 
nor did it ever do so with the masters of the art. If 
Dryden be abusive and foul in his ' Mackflecknoe,' one 



iS2 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

cannot but acknowledge that he is wise and beneficent 
in his 'Absalom and AchitopheL' The characters there 
are drawn with a pen which never faltered in its deline- 
ations, and they stand out as real and as true in their 
way as the Raphael chalk portraits in theirs. Villiers 
and Shaftesbury will never escape from the pen of 
Dryden, any more than John Dennis will from that of 
Pope. But the satirist, as all satirists do, harmed him- 
self as much as he did the objects of his anger, and himself 
was gibbeted when caught. The Recording Angel which 
reaches the Heaven of posterity, drops a tear upon man's 
failings which effectually erases them, although their 
vices are proof against such a detergent ; and follies, not 
vices, are the true objects of satire. In saying this we 
are not excusing either y indeed, we doubt whether, for 
actual amount of evil done, the fool does surpass the 
rogue; certain it is that folly has done more harm to 
society than vice. We suspect a rogue, but we cannot 
guard against a fool ; we may shield ourselves from the 
pistol of an enemy, but we are lost if our own weapon 
breaks in our hand. A race of gentler satirists than 
Dryden and Pope soon perceived this, just as the former 
had seen that the ridicule of Aristophanes was ever so 
much keener, and more useful as a weapon than the tre- 
mendous invective of Juvenal or Persius. Indeed, the 
latter can scarcely be called satirists in the true sense. 
It is not satirical to photograph a pest-house, or to give 



HOGARTH AND SWIFT. 153 

a line-for-line drawing of a horrible deformity. Hogarth 
was not satirical when he drew ' Gin Lane,' but he was 
so in his ' Election/ and his ' March to Finchley,' and in 
many other works. The last picture of his 'Harlot's 
Progress ' or of his ' Rake ' may boast one or two satiric 
touches ; but the Painter rises far above satire, and wails, 
like another Jeremiah, over the sins and sorrows of the 
city. So again with Swift. That writer had far too high 
a genius to be commonly understood. Hence many 
people abuse him instead of loving him ; hence the 
words, beast, man-hater, foul-tongued fellow, applied to 
him. But Swift understood himself. In his ' Tale of a Tub' 
and ' Gulliver ' he penned as fine satires as the world ever 
saw ; but in his verses ' On a Lady's Bedchamber,' and 
others of the sort, he spoke dirt, and meant to speak 
dirt, and was too earnest to be satirical. He claims 
credit for it in more places than one, and of his satire he 
says, in his letter to Sir Charles Hogan, ' I had a design 
to laugh the follies out of existence, and to whip the 
vices out of practice ; ' but he adds that that design and 
that satiric genius had been his great bar through life. 
So it was, and is : try to improve the world, and it will 
hate you, if it suspects the design. 

Knowing this, as we have said, a milder kind of satire 
grew prevalent. Dr. Young has shown, in his ' Universal 
Passion,' that he knew too well what he was about to hit 
very hard. His remarks were general, and he left par- 



154 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

ticulars to themselves. Great sinners, he thought, should 
be dealt with by the law. He would attack the vice, and 
not the vicious. A judge might just as well have sen- 
tenced Murder, and let go Greenacre or Daniel Good. 
But the astute Doctor thrived, and nobody said of him, 
as they did of Pope, that he was a ' nasty, spiteful little 
devil.' Dr. Young never had the courage of Pope \ the 
latter writes : 

There are — I scarce can think it, but am told, 
There are to whom my satire seems too bold. 

Scarce to wise complaisant enough, 

And something said of Chartres much too rough. 

But, in spite of this, he still spoke of Chartres, and still 
hit at Lord Fanny (Hervey) — 

That bug with gilded wings, 

That painted child of dirt, who stings and sings, 

and finally slew his hecatomb at the altar of Satire in the 
' Dunciad.' 

Good and mild Cowper followed too much in the wake 
of Young to give piquancy to his verses. Sound and 
admirable as they are, smartly as they hit the freethinker 
and the debauchee, they are never personal. The satirist 
lashed only the vices, and his example is now generally 
followed. Peter Pindar, Churchill, and GirTord created 
some amusement in their day. Peter was personal 
enough, but he said rude things, and practised invective 



MODERN SATIRE. 155 

rather than satire. It is not satirical to assert of Sir 
Joseph Banks, 'that strange to utter, he, when a very 
little boy at school, ate spiders spread upon his bread 
and butter 3 ' it is not satirical to expose the poor old mad 
king in his conversations with Whitbread, or his questions 
about the apple dumpling. All these are within the 
boundaries of clever sarcasm, and that often very un- 
scrupulous. Peter Pindar Wolcot could do better than 
this, and has done better, and has humour and satiric 
power, too, in abundance. 

The days of strong versified abuse are, however, gone. 
Almost every writer is now a satirist ; some are of the 
very mildest possible description, but literary scalp- 
hunters are few. Articles savage and slaughterly appear 
occasionally, but their appearance is hailed with disap- 
probation, and the satirist contents himself with exposing 
the club-foot of the limping exquisite, or showing the 
rouge pot and wrinkles of the old beau. The ' dear 
wicked satiric creatures,' as the ladies call them, are very 
strong upon ladies' hats and crinoline ; upon ugly old 
women who are weak enough to wish to keep their 
precious youth ; upon the ugly women who try to look 
pretty ; upon the vulgar who wish to be fashionable ; or 
the poor little city gent, who, rising from a lower form of life, 
tries to ape the dress and behaviour of his betters. All 
these are legitimate objects of satire, but the wrath ex- 
pended upon them is not very god-like. It is easy to 



156 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

crush a butterly upon a wheel, but the frivolous occu- 
pation will not add to one's strength. The mildness, 
meekness, and perfect propriety under which the writers 
of ' Punch' manage to rein their esprit moqueur may be and 
are conducive to calm language, but certainly do not give 
rise to any vigour of thought. We doubt whether the 
whole nation is not weakened by the proceeding ; and it 
is but lately, when certain incompetent generals lost us 
whole brigades, and .starved men and horses by the 
troop, that the dead level of English feeling showed 
itself. Indignatio facit versus possibly, but the scorn and 
hatred at such proceedings were not divine enough for 
poetry, and no indignant vates branded the fools and 
imbeciles to all eternity; the latter, therefore, escaping 
the satire, quietly have kept their places, and have even 
received honours (?). 

Strong, sound satire, such as Churchill could have 
penned would have done us service ; but our nearest 
approach to Churchill was Jerrold, a man of a very 
capable but limited spirit, whose best sarcasms were so 
polished and successful that he with many others 
thought himself a satirist. When he told a friend, who 
urged that both being litterateurs they rowed 'in the 
same boat ; ' yes, but ' not with the same sculls,' he 
merely vented what rhetoricians call an antanaclasis, and 
unscholastic people a pun with a sarcastic turn. He was 
often offensively bitter, and he earned for himself that 



THACKERAY. 157 

which he did not deserve — the reputation of an unkindly- 
man. This he was not, but he was so continually em- 
ployed in making up sharp sayings that he could not 
stay to pick and choose the persons upon whom to vent 
them. His best sayings are in his comedies. His books 
of satire, read even at this short distance of time, are 
excessively ponderous and heavy. It is one thing to attack 
a man with a club, another to prick him with a lancet. 
One school thought that a man could not be touched 
unless his brains were knocked out. The intention of 
such satirists is always evident, whereas satire should be 
like summer lightning, visible to all, but fatal only to the 
vermin and noxious insects. 

The Magnus Apollo of satire of late years, everyone 
will say, was Mr. Thackeray; indeed, his last novel, 
' Lovel the Widower,' seemed to promise but a collocation 
of sly things whispered in the ear of society by its satiric 
monitor. But it seems to us that his power in this way 
is much inferior to that of his master, Fielding — or even 
to that of Dickens. When the latter tells us of a certain 
German baron, who being visited with conscientious 
qualms of a murder, seized upon certain wood and stone 
belonging to a weaker baron, and built a chapel with 
them, thereby hoping to propitiate Heaven, the satire is 
so true and pungent that we all feel touched by it. Our 
offerings also are too often polluted, and we gain a 
deeper knowledge of ourselves. When Mr. Punch in his 



158 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

earlier days used, as a pendant to the descriptions of 
fashionable parties, to describe the supper of Mr. Brown 
the sweep and Hoggins the costermonger, upon whose 
table bread and cheese and onions and other deli- 
cacies of the season were observed, the satire was so 
true and keen, although gentle, that the ' Morning Post' 
and ' Court Journal ' were considerably amended thereby. 
But the author of ' Vanity Fair ' owned few such gentle 
touches. Satyr-like, he used his crook for the purpose of 
lifting up the skirts of society, and exhibiting her clay 
feet ; he has written chapter after chapter on the pilfering 
landladies, swaggering captains, clownish baronets, and 
dubious aristocracy : we feel that our neighbours are hit 
rather than ourselves, and we go on our way rejoicing. 
This kind of satire does no good. It makes us regard 
all around us with a cynic sneer, and perpetually cry out, 
* Ah ! it is all very well, saintly Miss Dash and good 
Mr. Blank, but you have a skeleton in your cupboard as 
well as the rest. So on, ad nauseam, the phrases of 
social scepticism soon grow stale ; and the satirist, wb$ 
perpetually grinds over the same dull tune, enervates and 
debases rather than reforms. 



CHAPTER XIII. 
ON THE CULTIVATION OF VIRTUE. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

Good to be Grown — Examination — Cram — Modern School- 
boys — Blunderers — Diplomacy — Successful Roguery — The 
true Hero. 




the horn. 



'AN you raise good men and women as you 
raise potatoes ? In Norfolk they will breed 
you turkeys to the pound weight, and raise 
oxen that shall be so many inches long in 
You may have it all to order — turkey, potato, 
or ox : nay, there is in Co vent Garden a fruit- salesman, 
who, give him but six weeks' notice, will supply peaches, 
strawberries, early peas, or pine-apples, to your table at 
any season of the year. It is only a matter with him of 
forcing on or keeping back. Can we produce statesmen, 
poets, soldiers, or good men, women, and citizens, in a 
like manner ? This simile of a vegetable and a man — man 
being himself but a pestilent forked radish of a fellow, who 

M 



162 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

struts and stares, and moans or frets his hours away — is a 
very old one. The ornate Thomson, ' more fat than bard 
beseems,' suggested the idea to our infant understandings. 
' Delightful task/ he says, ' to rear the tender thought, to 
teach the young idea how to shoot;' as if man was but a 
succulent plant, a young vine, or a frame cucumber, that 
should be pushed that way or led this. And yet cucum- 
bers have troubled wise men, having a tendency to curl 
up in the "fashion of a ram's horn, or to run spindling 
down, and then to bulge out in a bulbous way at the 
end, as is the manner with some noses of our acquaint- 
ance. Can a man be as easily guided as a cucumber by 
that genius, who, placing straight lamp glasses in the 
beds, made the gherkins grow to maturity with that 
charming propriety and symmetry, of which examples 
are to be seen at our fruiterers' ? 

The French nation has for some years had an idea 
that virtue could and can be cultivated. So have the 
Chinese, or, as they called them in Dampier's time, the 
' Chineesses.' The French have periodical examinations, 
a constant surveillance, and then, with an awful oration, 
in the midst of applausive parents, Spiders, and fat 
citizens, they, after kissing the boys on each cheek, stick 
a wreath on their heads, and give them a bundle of 
books. Unhappily, prize boys, and prize poems, and 
prize everything, except ploughs and sewing-machines, 
turn out badly here. Whether the extravagant feeding 



CULTIVATED VIRTUE. 163 

did not produce the cattle disease was a question gravely 
propounded; whether cramming boys with learning, 
which at best they cannot well comprehend, does not 
produce a useless and feelingless animal, which ' blows ' 
early, like a flower forced in a hot-house, and which after- 
wards puts forward neither flower nor fruit, is another 
question which many persons have decided in the affirm- 
ative. Too much cramming in early life produces, Mr. 
Dickens would have us believe, a kind of Mr. Toots, 
who becomes, when he grows up, a puzzle-headed fellow, 
full of listless indifference. 

That boys learn more now at school is, perhaps, certain. 
The scope of education is more extensive, the matter 
more varied. Too wide by far, it seems to many, is the 
view taken of the education of youth, arising, as we 
think, from the mistaken view that education should 
cease after leaving school or college, and that extreme 
youth is the only seed-time of life. Not only is this but 
partially true in many respects, but on the whole it is 
deplorably false. The purport of education is only to fit 
a man to learn, not to fill him with learning. We do not 
take all our meals at breakfast-time, nor should we insist 
upon loading our heads with learning in the morning of 
life. To create a general fitness for reception, and to 
ascertain the particular tendency of the mind, can be, 
and ever should be, the only aim of the educator. 
During the time of a boy's or girl's separation from the 



1 64 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

home of the parents, the qualities least prominent in the 
majority of homes, such as regularity, simplicity of living, 
a Spartan plainness of diet, hardihood, self-reliance, and 
bravery, should be instilled. These really may be taught 
so as to become part and parcel of the boy. At present, 
however, a very different system prevails ; and at some 
of our most noted schools the foundation is laid, not for 
virtue and hardiness in after life, but for the most con- 
temptible and effeminate of vices. 

' With some of them,' writes a gentleman of our school- 
boys at Christmas, ' I travelled in the train. There they 
sat, with their burnished chimney-pots and their kid 
gloves, their spotless clothes and faultless boots — the 
most conceited little prigs in the universe ! The very 
look of them told you how remarkably satisfied they were 
with themselves. " We are Etonians "was expressed in 
every feature. Some of them were young lords, crawled 
to, and fawned on, and flattered already, and even now 
assuming the airs of consequence, as of those who take 
homage as their due. Others are sent by tuft-hunting, 
parasite parents expressly to tuft-hunt, to form connec- 
tions which may serve them in after life, to have it said 
that they have been at Eton with a young marquis, and 
have been bowled from him at cricket ; to acquire the 
early habits and manners of gentlemen in the very gen- 
teelest society.' 

This is not the way to form English boys. But, unfor- 



BLUNDERERS. 165 

tunately, the picture is too true. These boys are fops 
while they are yet children, and have credit at the tailors, 
and ' tick ' at the confectioners, where they run up bills 
for truffled turkeys and ices. Drunkenness is not un- 
known among them, and foppery is a common character- 
istic. Is this the way to form men who shall hereafter 
govern England ? Are the upper classes giving them- 
selves a fair chance ? It was not so formerly at Rugby 
or Shrewsbury, nor is it so now at Wellington College, 
a soldier's school, founded by Prince Albert. Wellington 
himself complained of the puppies and fops of Eton, 
though he afterwards added, 'but these puppies fight 
well.' Yes, certainly, and fight they did, but not better 
than the ploughmen and young tailors that they led. All 
British men have a certain amount of pluck ; but by what 
rule parents can allow their boys to be spoilt — to read 
of the severe Cato and virtuous Scipio, and yet to be 
neither exact nor virtuous — is a wonder. In after life 
most of such boys turn out blunderers, when their high 
rank forces them (more's the pity !) into diplomatic and 
official life. These blunderers are very harmful to us all, 
and have cost England more than the whole of the 
aristocracy has ever won for her. Beyond that, which is 
serious enough, such schoolboys only harm themselves. 
We may be sure that, omitting exceptional and favoured 
cases, these boys miss their place in life, and can no 
more compete with a fierce democracy, or rule a nation 



1 66 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

beneficially, than an over-fed Italian greyhound can 
course and catch a hare upon the Chiltern Hills. 

The 'cultivation of virtue/ which should be com- 
menced at school, is now almost totally neglected for 
that of ability, adroitness, or quickness ; for these quali- 
ties carry away the prizes. What is really prize-worthy is 
capacity and goodness. Our boys are not handicapped : 
a very quick boy in the midst of half-a-dozen dull ones 
gains the prize as easily as a racehorse when matched 
against six or seven road-hacks. The French system is 
better, and it extends also — and here we differ from triem 
— to after-life, when the Montholon prizes are given openly 
to those, in any class of life, who have exhibited good- 
ness. A year or so ago a young milliner, and a person 
who kept a shop, were picked out as the two most worthy, 
and received the prize. Of course, to those young people 
who are nothing if not critical, this crowning of two 
persons in a humble state of life is something ridiculous. 
But it is not so to the recipients, nor is it in reality so to 
any but Laodicean sceptics, who, understanding little, 
sneer at everything. 

It is but natural that the lower strata of society should 
furnish the more frequent examples of real goodness. 
The actual foible is this : that, were we to crown all de- 
serving people, we should always see crowds of crowned 
heads walking along the streets. How many men and 
women devote the whole of their lives to others, take but 



REWARDS. 167 

an indifferent share of what they earn, and, after a life of 
hardship, creep to their obscure graves without an idea 
that they have done a meritorious action ? How many 
self-sacrifices are daily made, without the show or adver- 
tisement which accompanies the action of the warrior, or 
the brave doing of him who gains the Victoria cross ? 
There is, unhappily, little doubt that our criminal popu- 
lation is a large one ; but it is not a hundredth nor a 
thousandth part so large as that beneficial population which 
pays all the taxes, keeps the Queen and the Queen's 
troops, pays judges, lawyers, preachers, soldiers, police- 
men, and gaolers ; and, lastly, feeds and pets the poor 
rogues themselves, when they are undergoing their 
punishment in a capital healthy receptacle for criminals, 
called a prison, in which many people say, and we 
honestly believe with truth, Mr. Rogue is made a great 
deal too comfortable. 

True virtue, which can be cultivated, is nevertheless so 
vigorous a plant, that it grows best in its native state. 
When it is true, moreover, it never wants any reward. 
It is ridiculous to the man, and supremely so to society, 
to reward a labourer who for forty years has laboured, 
brought up a family, kept himself honest, sober, pious, 
respected, and poor — has never complained nor rebelled, 
but has borne his life's trials like a hero — it is absurd 
to reward such a man with a new pair of breeches, as 
does the old Tory Farming Association, with Mr. Disraeli 



1 68 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

at its head. Such honest peasants are God's saints here, 
and look to their reward hereafter. We do not know 
what we owe to their simple virtues. As ten righteous 
men would have saved Sodom, so this country, in many- 
trials and corruptions in James I.. Charles II., George II., 
and George IV.'s times, to judge from history, could only 
have been saved by God's grace given to the poor and 
virtuous of the land. As for the court, city, and high 
society, they stank, and were corrupt And yet, forsooth, 
Rochester and Chiffinch were just the men to preside at 
a meeting which would reward (?) with a new smock-frock 
a worn-out ploughman, whose virtue had saved them, and 
whose labour had fed them ! No : virtue gets not its 
reward in this world, neither does it look for it. It is the 
weakness of a generous heart to look for the eye which 
speaks thankfulness, and the murmured blessing of the 
one it has relieved ; but, in reality, it does good for good's 
sake, and it is better not to think of any return. One 
cannot /#y virtue, nor buy goodness. Honesty is not to 
be raised by policy only. When a man is honest only 
from motive, it is fair to infer that he would be roguish, 
also, should that pay better. 

These considerations will comfort young people, who 
often deplore that the best men sometimes get the worst 
of it in this world, and that the great prizes of wealth, 
honour, station, and titles, often fall to those who have 
least deserved them. But what then ? This is all proper. 



SUCCESSFUL ROGUES. 169 

Virtue itself is its own great reward. The motto is as old 
as Cato, and, if looked at properly, is a consoling truth. 
So sings Alexander Pope: — 

But sometimes Virtue starves, while Vice is fed — 
What then ? Is the reward of Virtue bread ? 

If the knave is clever, he deserves his money. If rigging 
the market, and picking the pockets of shareholders of 
the Doem, Cheatem, and Smashem Railway makes 
money, the promoters of that great line, with Lord Brag 
and Sir Mendax Pinto at their head, earn the money, 
and in a very dirty way too. Let us thank God that our 
table ale is not mixed with the tears of ruined orphans 
and widows, as is the 'dry' sherry of these men; and 
that the ' pop ' of our lemonade does not remind us, as 
does that of the directors' champagne, of the report of a 
suicide's pistol. Rich living, trouble, toil, extra servants 
that cheat, and a great house that is a great trouble, are 
a fit reward of many clever men, and a troublesome 
crown to some good men too. Good men claim, and 
get, quite another kind of prize : — 

What nothing earthly gives, nor can destroy, 
The soul's calm sunshine, and the heartfelt joy, 
Is Virtue's prize. A better would you fix ? 
Then give Humility a coach and six, 
Virtue a conqueror's sword, or Truth a crown, 
Or public spirit its great cure, a crown ! 

Solvuntur risu tabula! The whole company breaks 



170 A MAN'S THOUGHTS, 

into inextinguishable laughter at Humility riding in a 
coach and six, and a man who has devoted his life to the 
public having a crown put on his head and being made 
a king, so that the public shall hate him. Virtue, then, 
cannot be paid in this world ; the world's coinage is not 
current in her kingdom. Sometimes Virtue is starved ; 
she is often beaten, imprisoned, gagged, and harried out 
of house and home ; but she carries her reward, her con- 
solation, her food, comfort, and glory with her in her 
bosom ■ it is a little herb of grace — the love of God. 

But if she cannot be paid, she can be cultivated. 
Honest reason well applied to ethics must tell us that, 
after all, what is right is best. A knowledge of physi- 
ology will assure us, without the shadow of a doubt, that 
as a rule, riches, state, and position are but gilded sorrows, 
and that poverty — comparative poverty, not starvation, 
in which the great majority of the world exists — is infi- 
nitely happier than affluence or riches. Good sense will 
easily make all these apparent paradoxes plain enough. 
A man once was examined for a fellowship of three 
hundred a year, lost it, and lived to thank God for his 
loss. In the meantime he had cultivated reflection, 
reason, and content. 'We, ignorant of ourselves,' says 
the ever-wise Shakspere, ' beg often our own harms, 
which the wise powers deny us for our good ; so find we 
profit by losing of our prayers.' It takes a good deal of 
schooling on the part of the eager, ignorant, and im- 



THE TRUE HERO. 171 

patient heart of man to learn the truth of that ; but true 
it is. 

Young people are imitative. Hence we are quite right 
in putting before them examples of heroic virtue, either 
fictitious, historical, or real, and in having the story told 
simply and plainly. The boys and girls being unspoilt, 
you will soon see which person they like best: Caesar 
Augustus, surrounded by his flattering poets, or Brutus, 
dying upon the field ; Milton, old, blind, and deserted, 
or the fawning and successful Monk, the Earl of Albe- 
marle, rewarded for his treachery by a coronet ; Charlotte 
Corday, marching with her pearl pink face, lighted up 
with a pale glow of triumph, to the prison which leads 
but to the scaffold, or the Judges, clothed in pride and 
drunken with overstrained power, who condemned her. 
Why, the very chains of the prisoner are robes of starry 
gold compared to the glittering frippery of the sordid 
monarch who condemns him ! Let Xerxes swell and 
bourgeon in the fumes of his power, like a gilded dung- 
hill fly in the sun ; let court poet and historian sing his 
praises over and over again ; let him die in glory, and be 
buried in such a pyramid that it should stare the moon 
out of countenance ; yet he would not equal the simple 
glory of Leonidas and his Spartans lying under the bare 
stone in a mountain pass, with the simple inscription — 
' Stranger, tell it at Lacedaemon, that we died here in 
obedience to her laws.' Such stories as these will beat 



1 72 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

all those selfish and foolish narrations of successful mer- 
chants : how Paul's penny became a thousand pounds ; 
and how Peter scraped and starved his wife and family 
till he was rich enough to take a large house and make 
the yellow gold run in a stream into his pocket. He had 
better made true, honest feelings run out of his heart. 

By example, then, by narrative, and by a constant 
appeal to the true state of things, virtue can be cultivated 
either in ourselves or in others. We had better set about 
it, for as matters stand we shall want — indeed we now 
want — an extra supply of that article, which is much 
better than rifled guns, or armour-plates, or breech- 
loaders. We want our eyes opened to justice, so as to 
see clearly and to judge rightly ; to be firm in our refusal 
to move ; or, when we do move, to do so in the right 
path. Hitherto we have done well, and have been 
accompanied with blessings ; but now around us things 
somewhat darken. We shall have much ado to hold our 
own ; and the only way for us to do so truly, either as 
individual men or as a nation, is to understand virtue, 
and to cultivate it carefully. 




CHAPTER XIV. 
BRITISH PHILISTINISM. 




CHAPTER XIV. 

A New. Word—Philistia of Old— 'Milton's Samson— A Shade 
more Soul— The Barbarians — The People — Mr. Carlyle and 
the Nobility — Trade — The World 's Ideals. 

SINGULAR son of a very remarkable father 
— one who is in some measure a leader of 
modern thought, has helped to circulate a 
new word,* and to affix upon British men 
and manners a new name. Matthew Arnold, the son 
of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, a name dear to many, be- 

* The word Philister, or Philistine, was used in its modern sense 
by Carlyle, Sydney Smith, and others before Matthew Arnold was 
born ; it has been current in Germany-^more particularly in univer- 
sity towns among students — as a cant term to express the trading 
townspeople, the Kleinstddter of Lessing, for more than a century. 
Carlyle coined our English Philistinism, and the word soon found 
currency in America. Matthew Arnold adopts it in its German 
sense — the littleness of trade in money-grubbing. 



176 A MAN'S TITO U GUTS. 

loved by the boys' hearts still remaining in the breasts 
of grey-headed men, one of the chief leaders in Church 
and State, is he who has done this ; and it is worth 
while to examine how far he is truly inspired when he 
plays upon this one-stringed harp, and endeavours to 
affix on his countrymen a name disgraceful and abhor- 
rent to all the noble and pure-minded. 

We must go back to sacred history, and no less to the 
poetry of Milton, to examine who the Philistines were. 
People who have merely an indefinite idea that they were 
a rich nation on the confines of Judaea, often at war with 
the Israelites, and whose soldiers were slaughtered by 
the thousand with the jawbone of an ass, wielded by 
Samson, will not realise nor feel the insult and the sneer, 
nor will they profit by the lesson, which we think at least 
necessary and salutary. 

The Philistines, as we should properly call these 
people, then inhabited the plain of Philistia ; and bounded 
on the north by Phoenicia and Syria, and on the south 
by Egypt and Arabia, the fertility and the position of 
their country gave them enormous wealth. So far they 
were like England. ' Ashdod and Gaza were the keys 
of Egypt, and commanded the transit trade,' says a 
writer on this people ; ' and the stores of frankincense 
and myrrh which Alexander captured at the latter place 
prove it to have been a depot of Arabian produce.' 
Moreover, the Philistines seem to have possessed a navy, 






PHILISTIA. 177 

and to have attacked the Egyptians from their ships : 
they were extremely skilful as armourers, smiths, and as 
architects of walled and strong towns. They were skilled 
goldsmiths, for they made emerods and gold mice, 
images, and gods and goddesses without question. 
Their wealth was abundant, and they were strong in their 
own conceit, given to feasting, to assembling together 
and holding long palavers or parliaments, and had all 
the appearances of a strong and eminently respectable 
people. If we take these characteristics, we shall find 
that Mr. Matthew Arnold, who so well knows how to 
point his satire, was not very wrong in calling us by the 
name he has used. 

It is just when Philistia is at the culmination of her 
complacent power, able to worry and oppress the Israel- 
ites, ready to send armed men from her own rich land to 
spoil that of her poor but holier neighbours, that there 
appear on the scene a very remarkable man, named 
Samson, who was ' a Nazarite unto God from the womb.' 
Previous to his birth, his mother drank no wine nor 
strong drink ; neither did she eat any unclean thing, 
Samson grew up a very tower of strength, mighty as the 
fabled Hercules, if indeed he was not he, ' and the spirit 
of the Lord began to move him at times in the camp of 
Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.' 

How it moved him we all know. Despising the rich 
living of the Philistines, caring neither for their gold- 

N 



178 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

smiths' work, nor for their great trade, nor for their wine 
and their feastings, their riches, their clothing, and their 
large houses, although they had dominion over Israel, he 
sought an occasion against them, and, as we know, not in 
vain. Tricked by them with regard to his riddle and the 
raiment, he went down to Ashkelon and slew thirty men 
of them, and took their spoil, and gave change of gar- 
ments unto them which expounded his riddle. After- 
wards he set fire-branded foxes into their standing corn, 
and smote them hip and thigh with great slaughter, and 
again, with the jawbone of an ass, slew a thousand of 
them, was bound and snared, and again burst forth to 
slay them, until, snared by Delilah, he was blinded by 
his enemies, made a mockery of, and set to grind corn 
while the Philistian lords feasted in a great house ; when 
his strength came again, and he cried, ' O Lord God, 
remember me, I pray Thee, and strengthen me, I pray 
Thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once 
avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes ; ' and then, 
sure that the Lord had heard him, he bowed his strong 
arm with all his might, holding ' the two middle pillars 
upon which the house stood ; and the house fell upon 
the lords and upon all the people that were within ; and 
the dead which he slew at his death were more than 
they which he slew in his life.' 

So ends the story of Samson, judge of Israel, one who 
received his strength from the Lord, and who hated the 



MILTON'S SAMSON. 179 

Philistines, but who was snared and blinded, and made 
to grind corn for them, and to be their sport, but who 
was faithful and undaunted, and though stained some- 
what, as our new morality makes us think, with the sins 
of the flesh, was not yet deserted by God, but carried 
out in his death the end for which he was born. Cer- 
tainly, he pulled down destruction on his own head ; but, 
as his father, Manoah, in Milton's great dramatic poem, 
is made to say, even that was a triumph. He left 

To himself and father's house eternal fame ; 
And, which is best and happiest yet, all this 
With God not parted from him, as was fear'd, 
But favouring and assisting to the end. 
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail 
Or knock the breast ; no weakness, no contempt, 
Dispraise or blame ; nothing but well and fair, 
And what may quiet us in a death so noble. 

It is significant that Milton, in his blindness, turned to 
the history of Samson to illustrate his own feelings, and 
pictured to himself his loyalist countrymen rejoicing in 
the return of the foolish and bad King Charles II. No 
doubt, also, the people of England figured to him under 
the name of Philistines. 

What Mr. Matthew Arnold means he explains more 
fully under the title of ' Anarchy and Authority.' He 
shows, by a side glance as it were, that our nation has 
fallen into a very sad state, and that we are, in the main, 
incapable of governing ourselves, and a long way out of 



180 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

the true and noble road in which a nation should walk. 
Nor is he in this very far wrong. The great middle 
class, rich, self-satisfied, relying on its ships, its works, 
its power, and its possessions, are the. Philistines ; but 
we have besides, he says, in England, the aristocratic 
class, or the Barbarians, descendants of those conquerors 
of England and Europe, to whom we owe so much 
individuality ; who are noted for their courtesy and 
culture. Only all this culture is mainly an exterior 
culture ; it consists principally in outward gifts and 
graces, in looks, manners, accomplishments, prowess ; 
the chief inward gifts which had part in it were the most 
exterior, so to speak, of inward gifts — those which come 
nearest to outward ones : they were courage, a high 
spirit, self-reliance. But then this class, of which Lord 
Elcho is taken as a type, although in the main good, has 
grave faults, mainly an ' insufficiency of light.' It is a 
brave class, and means well, but it has none of the in- 
ward spirit. ' Even when we look on these brilliant 
creatures/ sneers the author, ' in the presence of all their 
charming gifts, do we not think that there should be a 
shade more soul?' 

Fond of hunting, fine manners, beautiful things, 
country life, high places, parks and castles, which are 
' fortified posts ' of the Barbarians, but for the most part 
without soul, and utterly, or what amounts to the same 
thing, habitually careless of all those below them, we will 



THE POPULACE. 181 

let the representatives of this class pass by, and take 
another, the lowest in the scale, but beneath which there 
seems to us to seethe a lower depth still. This, the 
low, not the lowest depth, is the Populace, in Mr. Arnold's 
language, which looks forward to the happy day when it 
will sit on thrones, with Mr. Bazley and other middle- 
class potentates, to survey, as Mr. Bright beautifully 
says, ' the cities it has built, the railroads it has made, 
the manufactures it has produced, the cargoes which 
freight the ships of the greatest mercantile navy that the 
world has ever seen.' This portion of the people, there- 
fore, which is wholly occupied in surveying itself, and 
according to Plato's subtle expression, l with the things 
of itself and not its best self,' has much in common with 
the Philistines ; but what is dangerous about it is, that 
its substratum is formed of a very dangerous class indeed. 
That vast portion, lastly, of the working class, which, raw 
and half-developed, has long lain hidden midst its 
poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding- 
place, to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of 
doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by 
marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling 
what it likes, breaking what it likes — to this vast residuum 
we may with great propriety give the name of the Popu- 
lace. 

One more question from Mr. Arnold, and we have 
done. Have we made quite clear what he means by a 



1 82 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

British Philistine, by those people whom we have all met 
on the Continent ? of whom we are thoroughly ashamed, 
and yet in part proud, who are the backbone, as they assert, 
of the country, but a very ugly backbone notwithstand- 
ing. ' Philistine,'' says the modern author of the term, 
' gives the notion of something particularly stiff-necked 
and perverse in the resistance to light and its children ; 
and therein it specially suits our middle class, who not only 
do not pursue sweetness and light, but who prefer to them 
that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea-meetings, 
and addresses from Mr. Murphy and the Rev. W. Cassel, 
which make up the dismal and illiberal life on which I 
have so often touched.'' 

Thus, while we are bound to acknowledge on the 
one hand that, living in the nineteenth century, England 
has reached a certain degree of civilisation, and is per- 
haps, as Emerson has it, ' the best of actual nations,' we 
can but own that it is a poor best ; nay, if we think at all 
deeply, we shall be ready to concede that our middle- 
class life does want l sweetness and light,' and that in the 
general routine of every-day existence it is essentially ' a 
dismal and illiberal life.' It is this feeling that makes all 
young and poetical natures — and all natures when young 
and fresh have something of the poet in them — exclaim 
against the hard-hearted nonsensical conventionalities of 
life, which make them often in despair run away from 
civilisation, nay from life itself. It is this, too, which 



THE ARISTOCRACY, 183 

makes the daily intercourse of life seem so cold, so 
dreadful, so full of hypocrisy, which gathers people into 
classes, and arrays them one against the other. It is 
this which gives popular novelists the chance of describ- 
ing the middle class as lord-loving and tuft-hunting, 
seldom or never looking at the merit of a man, but re- 
garding chiefly his money and his position ; not deter- 
mining even that young men shall grow up wise and 
virtuous, but that they shall grow up the companions of 
Lords This and That, the college chums of some vicious 
nobleman ; not that their daughters shall equal Virginia 
in innocence, or Cornelia in matronly wisdom, but that 
they shall make a great match and be received at Court. 
All this, and a, dozen other traits of a selfish and narrow 
class, prove that the charge of Philistinism can be sus- 
tained against them. 

But they are not alone. We have lately heard from 
Mr. Carlyle and others a great deal in praise of our aris- 
tocracy. The English nobleman, says that prophet, 'has 
still left in him, after such sorrowful emotions, something 
considerable of chivalry and magnanimity. Polite he is 
in the finest form ; politeness — modest, simple, veritable, 
ineradicable — dwells in him to the bone. I incline to 
call him the politest kind of nobleman or man (especially 
his wife, the politest and gracefullest kind of woman) you 
will find in any country.' Yes, 'in any country,' we 
think this true ; but we don't think much of the truth. 



1 84 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

We do not want graceful polish only. French polish 
outside veneer is not the flower of life, but truth at its 
highest and best. The British nobleman at school, the 
British nobleman at college running into debt, swaggering 
about like a big boy, hardly amenable to rules, running 
up to town and on town in term time, going to chapel 
with a hunting-coat and top-boots under his gown, de- 
lighting in breaking the heads of the town-people, calling 
all below him 'cads ' or ' snobs,' and yet glad to accept 
the subserviency of those same cads, and to borrow money 
of them, to go to their parties, and to air himself like a 
black-skinned potentate, as proud of his title as is King 
Jacko-Mongo-Pongee of the cocked hat and epaulettes 
which adorn his nakedness ; this British nobleman is not 
the highest representative of man. Nor when he talks — 
and he has talked, as they yet brag of it — of sending his 
black footman into the House of Commons, and takes 
care, although his body is five hundred strong at least, 
never to go to the House of Lords, nay, to let his tenantry 
fester mentally in dark ignorance, and (as in Sussex, the 
other day, in one village) absolutely in typhus fever, for 
want of proper building improvements, while he spends 
his cultivated life in Paris ; when he does this, and his 
order does it every day, we cannot accept the British 
nobleman as the highest type of man. He is a very 
good fellow, no doubt ; not very wise, or his order would 
have been held in more respect; somewhat lazy and 



THE WORLDS IDEALS. 185 

luxurious, but — and here we must again be obliged to 
Mr. Matthew Arnold — a Barbarian. 

Shall we find any comfort in looking on the Populace ? 
Is that class free from reproach ? Perhaps not \ but it 
can at least say one thing : it has had less given to it, 
and it has done more, than any other class. You take 
your priests and your noblemen from the Philistines 
proper, and they go about the world making the best of 
it, for the most part, for themselves ; but we, the working 
populace, improve it for others. There can be no doubt 
of that. We are misled, it is true. We have so much to 
do, and the battle of life goes on so hotly down our 
courts and alleys, and we have so much to suffer, too, 
that we do not always appear wise to our rulers ; but we 
are true and leal to certain ideals ; and if in the wrong — 
as we often are — ours is a noble error, ever striving to 
get to the right. Thus we are surging upwards, while 
the Philistine and Barbarian are driving God knows 
whither. This may be said for us. 

But alas ! 'tis little. The ideals of the world are 
shameful, lame ideals, mere idols of wood and stone, 
and no true gods \ and this, too, after eighteen hundred 
years of the truest teaching, of the simplest and sublimest 
truth. 

Happily, the Truth lives. That cannot die. Above 
the petty Little Pedlington class interests at this largely 
critical period, when Tom wants to govern, and Lord 



1 86 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Noodle protests that Tom does not know how; when 
Co-operative Stores enable everybody to rob the trades- 
man, and get all things at trade price, and the tradesman 
robs everybody, in his turn, with bank shares and rail- 
way scrip j when, from the very crown of society to its 
great toe, every member of the body politic is shirking 
responsibility, and calling upon some other member to 
do his work ; when the ship is driving and surging on- 
wards, and the only way to steer it properly is, says one 
prophet, to catch the Devil, and chain him — laying him 
up, ' tied neck and heels, and put beyond stirring, as the 
preliminary ' ; and so after this imaginary evil the whole 
crew are scampering, steersman and all : during all this 
time Truth lives, and must at last conquer. We are none 
of us what we should be. We have class hatreds, preju- 
dices, wickedness, and follies. Philistinism is rampant 
amongst us. But Christianity is about to take a new 
development. This half-hearted faith, this imperfect 
mode of life, has long been weighed in the balance ; the 
young Samson is born. When the new development 
shall have come to its strength, the whole of the hated 
and contemptible nation of Philistines will have passed 
away. 




CHAPTER XV. 
IIX-NATURED PHILOSOPHY. 



CHAPTER XV. 




Cynics — Timon — Modern imitators — Young Cynics — Sneering 
— Carlyle and Thackeray — True love — Falseness of Cynicism 
— Byron* 

HE ancient Greeks called certain philoso- 
phers who formed a school of themselves, 
Cynics, from a word meaning a dog, because 
such philosophers snarled and sneered at 
human life, disregarded many of the duties and virtues, 
laughed at the responsibilities, and generally elevated 
themselves above their fellows by running down what 
other men held sacred and beautiful. It would be a 
piece of ignorance for us to assert that the Cynics did 
this, just as it would be foolish to believe that the Epi- 
cureans really held the opinion that sensual pleasure, the 
mere delight of eating, drinking, and being comfortable, 
formed the ideal of a life. Pleasure was their chief aim 



i 9 o A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

but a wise pleasure will arise only from the exercise ol 
virtue ; that true and holy pleasure which is enduring 
can only be the true one. 

To cynicism we apply almost one meaning only, and 
that an unpleasant one. A cynic is, metaphorically, one 
who growls and barks at others ; he is a dog in the manger, 
and loves not to hear of others' successes or pleasures. 

Blame, cynic > if you can, quadrille or ball, 
The snug close party, or the splendid hall, 
Where Night, down stooping from her ebon throne, 
Views constellations brighter than her own. 

These are Cowper's lines, and exhibit one view ol 
cynicism. Bishop Berkeley uses, however, another 
meaning of the word, in which discontent is not apparent, 
but rather a dog-like content. He asks, in his admirable 
and shrewd Querist, ' Whether the bulk of the native 
Irish are not kept from thriving, by that cynical content 
in dirt and beggary which they possess to a degree beyond 
any other people.' Here it indicates a good nature, 
which by extreme tension is stretched into a vice. 
Modern cynicism has nothing to do with that. The 
quality, as at present seen, and which has become 
fashionable amongst our young, rich, highly-educated, 
but ill-conditioned young men, is excellently pourtrayed 
by Shakspere in his character of the Greek cynic 
ApemantuSf who, while he watches the feasting and 



APEMANTUS. 191 

riotous living of the Lord Timon, knows well how to 
sneer at his folly. Asked to say grace at a rich man's 
table, Apemantus growls out the following : — 

Immortal Gods, I crave no pelf ; 
I pray for no man but myself : 
Grant I may never prove so fond, 
To trust man on his oath or bond, 
Or a harlot for her weeping, 
Or a dog that seems a-sleeping. 
Amen. So fall to't. 
Rich men sin, and I eat root ! 

Here we have the conceit, envy, selfishness, distrust and 
disbelief in fellow-man which properly constitute cynicism. 
For, observe, Apemantus prays for no man but himself, 
cares for none, believes in neither oath nor bond, does 
not even condescend to trust his precious carcass to the 
immortal Gods themselves, for so he means to tell us 
when he says that of them even he ' craves no pelf.' To 
outward appearances he gives no heed : all women are 
to him base, all dogs he distrusts, and believes that they 
may turn and rend him ; finally, he concludes with a 
piece of self-laudation, which wisdom teaches us is ridi- 
culous, and faith sinful. Rich men, he says, sin in their 
luxurious feeding ; but I eat root ; that is, / am better 
than they, because I find that vegetable food agrees with 
me better than meats. Anything farther from grace, for 
the willingness to accept what was placed before him and 



i 9 2 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

be thankful, could hardly be conceived. Apemantus has 
contrived to unite the worst qualities of the Grecian 
Cynic and of the Jewish Pharisee. 

Now it would be wrong to suppose for one moment 
that Antisthenes, who at Cynosages (whence some say 
the name of the sect) founded this school of philosophy, 
intended it to degenerate to what it did. It is not to be 
regarded, moreover, so much as a sect as an institution 
for the correction of manners. All vices, say some, in 
exact opposition to Rochefoucauld's maxim, are disguised 
virtues; and cynicism was intended first as a protest 
against frivolous finery, folly, and luxury. This protest 
is eternal, and is as much needed now as ever. What 
Antisthenes desired to teach was to subdue the passions, 
and to inculcate natural and simple manners. The 
Sybarite who complained that his sleep was broken be- 
cause a rose-leaf was doubled under him, was precisely 
the man who was to be mended by this school of be- 
haviour. The Cynic was not only haughty in manner 
from his contempt of the effeminate fools and fops around 
him, but he was simple in his diet, plain in his clothes, 
patient in his endurance of hunger, cold, and outward 
evils. In all this he was right : and so long as he ad- 
hered to this simple rule, the rough philosopher by his 
example benefited his kind. 

But it is a rule in this world that good turns to evil. 
Simplicity and the calmness of devotion turn, on the one 



DIOGENES. 193 

hand, to a bare carelessness ; and, on the other, when 
connected to a formal and showy, and therefore vicious 
ritualism. So cynicism quickly became coarse, rude, 
contemptuous and overbearing, and in fact worse than 
the evils it affected to cure. When Diogenes threw away 
his wooden bowl because he found that he could drink 
from the hollow of his hand, he was teaching a valuable 
lesson by an extreme example. We were not to hamper 
ourselves with unnatural furniture or luggage in going 
through the world. When visited by Alexander, who, 
flushed with conquest, condescended to ask what he 
could do for him, the Cynic replied, ' Merely get out of 
my sunshine,' feeling that he was as great as the swagger- 
ing captain in his clinking arms, his nodding plumes, 
gold helmet and glittering sword ; but when, going into 
the house of Plato, he disfigures the marble floor with his 
dirty sandals, bemires his couch, and cries out, * Thus do 
I trample on the pride of Plato,' we feel that the nobler 
philosopher was right in answering, ' And with greater 
pride, O Diogenes ! ' Cynicism soon fell in Greece into 
contempt, the rigorous habits became absurdly ascetic, 
men punished their ' vile bodies ' for nothing, and neg- 
lected science merely to cultivate virtue. We had the 
mediaeval history of the monks and ascetics acted hun- 
dreds of years before the monks lived. Then scandal 
opened her mouth, and the grossest tales were told con- 
cerning the sect, and the history was acted out ; the sect 

o 



i 9 4 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

died ; but, as we all know, the motive or impulse 
remains. 

There is a great deal of modern cynicism about, of that 
feeling which if it does not arise from mere ill-nature 
very soon culminates in it. Young men and boys— and 
we here mean by young men those below thirty— find it 
so easy to sneer, that they frequently are delighted to 
take up the habit. And to all, this disposition is so hate- 
ful, that everyone will agree with Milton's definition, 
when he says that ' A beardless cynic is the shame of 
nature.' And yet we see this beardless cynicism every- 
where. Certain successful reviews and newspapers, to 
which it would be folly to deny much talent, but the 
merits of which are vastly exaggerated by their success, 
have introduced the fashion of sneering at everything. 
Every author is found to be much lower in merit than 
his critic, every poem is commonplace, every preacher is 
dull and twaddling, every musician a copyist, every 
painter a mannerist, and so on. 

And there is a certain amount of truth in all this, as no 
poem is, nor by any possibility can be perfect ; neither 
is any picture original, nor any preacher uniformly inte- 
resting. As there must be an element of weakness in 
all our best human work, we should concede to the ill- 
natured critic small praise ; but there the matter ends. 
It is his business not to find defects only, but to point 
out merits ; ugliness is no doubt often to be pointed out, 



YOUNG SNEERERS. T95 

but so surely is beauty to be recognised ; nor is the man 
who lowers another by caustic and ill-natured criticism to 
be thought as clever as the man whom he lowers. It is 
a very old remark that we can find fault where we cannot 
mend the fault, nor even do so well as the person we 
blame : this consideration, carried too far, would stop 
the mouths of all critics save the masters of the art. And 
these we know to be kind and generous ; it is from the 
young and inexperienced that the author or painter gets 
the most cruelty. To be dashing, powerful, brilliant ; 
to hit hard to show how strong they are ; all this is the 
chief ambition of young critics : and as they treat 
humanity badly they in self-defence become cynical. Of 
course it is very bad to hit a defenceless man a cowardly 
blow ; but then it may be said, ingenuously, he deserved 
it; all men are rogues, and rogues deserve to be pun- 
ished ; ergo, this man has his deserts. 

Satisfied with this easy and logical demonstration, 
though upon the somewhat illogical method of proving 
a particular case by a general instance, the young cynic 
proceeds. Happily, let us hope, he being young, will 
improve, for there is nothing which proves a generous 
nature so much as the fact that as it grows older it ripens 
and becomes agreeable. The fine ribstone pippin gets 
mellow in the Autumn, and more mellow and kindly in 
the Winter ; nay, it will be sound at the core when old, 
and the blossoms of its parent tree are blooming into a 



196 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

fuller maturity. But the cynical crab will turn your teeth 
in its young days, and will grow rotten ere it be well ripe. 
So, too, the generous man — he who has considered 
nature, and knows from experience that perfection is 
unattainable, and that it is well to welcome even the im- 
perfect and the unready — will grow kinder and more 
generous every day. How often does such a one link 
himself by love to all around him, and hide in his own 
breast the faults of others, rather than establish a spu- 
rious reputation by pointing them out ! 

The present age is, as we have said, cynical. We 
began by pointing out the snobberies and shams of 
others ; we distrusted admirable Crichtons : and, with 
Carlyle, began with calling our brother-men wind-bags. 
We do not believe in peerages, and have long known 
that the motto Noblesse oblige is a false one. We believe, 
or affect to believe, that money can buy everything, that 
all praiseful criticisms are written to order, that all show 
is mere gilt gingerbread, and that everybody keeps a 
desperately ugly muggersome skeleton in his closet ; nay, 
he may have half a dozen for that matter. Thackeray 
taught our young fellows to go up to every idol and tap 
it, and cry out, ' Oh, how hollow you are ! ' He taught 
us, and he did it sometimes with an affected kindness, 
that everybody is a ' snob ; ' that is, a hypocrite. He 
even wrote a History of ' Snobs,' and rightly described 
its author as 'one of themselves.' The great house in 



SNEERING. 197 

the country and the small lodging in town were alike 
covered, in his eyes, with that shiny and thin veneer and 
artificial polish which hide all cracks. But to the cynical 
eye these cracks are of course visible enough. 

The young cynic of eighteen or twenty, taught by 
clever, sneering Mr. Thackeray, can approach any young 
couple and say, 'Ah, you unhappy snobs, / know it all; 
you are very polite to her now, Monsieur Mari, but you 
know you pinch her when alone; and you, you little 
blooming hypocrite, you, Madame Femme, how you 
defer to your husband, you can't stir a step without him, 
can't you ; oh no ! Ugh ! how you pout and scream 
and frown and flout at him when at home ! Ah ! poor 
fellow; who would be a husband ? ' And so the cynical 
snob goes on. He will infer to a clergyman, or, let us 
say, a moral author, that it is easier to preach than to 
practise, and that no one is better than he should be ; 
and this general kind of truth hits both hard enough, and 
the better men they are the harder it hits them, because 
they are conscious of shortcomings, although of a very 
different nature from those which the cynic dreams of. 
If anyone, for instance, had told St. Paul or the author 
whom we call Thomas a Kempis that he was a wretch, a 
sinner, a fool, the good man would have remorsefully 
acknowledged it. Hence the power of cynicism : it is 
harmless on bad men, but it hurts the tender-hearted and 
the good. 



198 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Moreover, cynicism is essentially false. The little 
snob whom we have pictured has perhaps no idea that 
he is utterly wrong in just as many instances as he is 
right. Fifty husbands out of a hundred are as fond as 
their natures will permit of their wives ; the percentage 
that die broken-hearted, or that are never the same again 
after the death of the wife is a very large one. The com- 
fortable and equable love at home is often a thousand 
times more demonstrative than Mr. Cynic can see abroad. 
A good, manly husband is much more likely to kiss his 
wife when alone, than when in company ; and quite as 
large a number of wives absolutely idolise their husbands, 
and feel miserable without their aid and presence. The 
most beautiful epitaph of Sir Henry Wotton (we thank 
his Shade that he has written it) is perfectly realised, 
with a pleasantly-sad frequency, in England, Scotland, 
Ireland, Germany, and other husband and wife-loving 
countries — 

He first deceas'd ; she for a little tri'd 

To live without him, lik'd it not, and di'd. 

Is it not as beautiful as it is quaint ? It was written 
upon the death of the wife of Sir Albertus Morton, an 
admirable gentleman, as another of Wotton's pieces will 
testify : * Tears at the grave of Sir Albertus Morton (who 
was buried at Southampton) wept by Sir H. Wotton.' 



SIR H. WOTTON. 199 

But is he gone ? and live I Rhyming here, 
As if some Muse would listen to my Lay, 
When all distun'd sit wailing for their Dear, 
And bathe the Banks where he was wont to play. 

Dwell thou in endless Light, discharged Soul ; 
Freed now from Nature's and from Fortune's trust : 
While on this fluent Globe my Glass shall roul, 
And run the rest of my remaining dust. 

It is a pity we have not a popular edition of the works 
from ' the curious pencil of that ever memorable Sir 
Henry Wotton, KV as he is called on the title-page of 
the Reliquice. Wottoniance. It speaks of his 'Incomparable 
pieces of Language and Art,' and certainly his * Character 
of a Happy Life,' happily quoted in defence of Queen 
Victoria by the Rt. Hon. Robert Lowe, his fishing song 
preserved by Walton, his verses on Chidick (sic) Tich- 
borne in the Tower, and his epigrams deserve the 
epithet. Chiefly we thank him for the most tender 
epitaph in the English language, and at the same time 
the highest praise of marriage. 

To sneer at married life is, then, very easy ; but, like 
most easy things, it is not worth much. It is easy to 
praise, very easy to blame ; the hard task is to do both 
justly, and to withhold the last if unjust. A cynical tem- 
per is no proof of talent : it proves greenness and want of 
experience, or it argues ill-health and little ease in the 
mind. Boys who are unsettled in life ; young geniuses 
who would be Lord Byrons ; persons who, with upcurled 



200 A MAA'S THOUGHTS. 

noses, can say, ' Ha, ha ! what is man? he is but a worm 
of the hour : what is woman ? " frailty, thy name is 
woman ; " ' — girls who think that man is inconstant ever, 
and who wait for the beautiful Ideal to turn up — such 
persons are cynics, but it is a dangerous game to play. 
We are not all young Hamlets or Byrons. If we indulge 
in it too much, we shall fall into a vile arrogancy, a dan- 
gerous conceit. A wiser estimate of his fellows is taken 
by the kindest, softest, yet most manly, the most preg- 
nant, powerful, knowing, and trenchant intellect that ever 
lived — who never once stooped to be cynical nor to sneer 
— when he says, ' What a piece of work is a man ! how 
noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form and 
moving how express and admirable ! in action how like 
an angel ! in apprehension how like a god ! ' Surely the 
lowest specimen of a being so described, and described 
truly, is worth more than the curl of a boy's lip, the 
elevation of a turn-up nose, and the meagre salutation of 
a sneer. 




CHAPTER XVI. 
TO.O-GOOD PEOPLE. 



CHAPTER XVI. 




Saints — The Apostles not Saints in a modern sense — Hood's j 
Lines — The Religiosus — Narrowing forms — Cowper — Confu- 
cius — Buddha — Stylites — Self sacrifice. 

ID a history of mistaken words exist, surely 
the word * saint ' would hold a chief place in 
it. It means much more and it means much 
less than people put to its account. In 
one sect of the Church, nay, in two (for the Roman and 
the Greek Christians have much reverence for saints), the 
word means little less than a Deus Minor or demi-god. 
Indeed, the invocation and worship of saints anticipate 
the judgment of God by the judgment of the Pope and 
the Church, which, by a canonisation legally conducted, 
places a man side by side with Christ, and makes him at 
the least a semi-mediator and quasi demi-god in the 
troops of the blessed. It is needless to refer the Pope — 



204 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

as did the patriarch of Constantinople — to the Scriptures, 
to prove that there is no tittle, no, not the shadow of a 
shade of evidence in favour of saint worship or saint 
invocation. The Roman Church has found the belief 
therein too profitable. Paul and Barnabas, while per- 
forming miracles at Lystra, so smote the hearts of the 
people that they would have worshipped them had not 
the ministers of Christ rent their clothes and cast dust 
upon their heads, 1 and run in upon the people, crying out, 
1 Sirs, why do ye these things ? We, also, are men of 
like passions with you.' And yet people are enjoined to 
put up prayers to these saints, dead, who, did they live, 
would think all such blasphemy ! Or, again, to make 
the logical inference stronger, Paul and Barnabas, corrupt 
and living on earth, refused to be worshipped or invoked ; 
but incorrupt and living in heaven, permit the dreadful 
sacrilege, because they are saints. Here, then, is one 
source of misapprehension. If Saint Paul, i.e., sanctus 
Paulus, the blessed Paul is a demi-god, we do not wonder 
at the Protestant or Bible Christian hating the name ; nor 

1 A sign of the intense horror with which these devout Christian- 
Jews beheld anything like idolatry or man-worship. It would have 
been thought impossible to mark awe-full disapprobation in a 
stronger way ; but the Book of Revelation affords a stronger instance. 
St. John wishes to fall at the feet and worship the angel of the Lord, 
and he is immediately and severely rebuked — ' See thou do it not: I 
am thy fellow- servant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony 
of Jesus : worship God.' Apocalypse, xix. io. 






THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 205 

do we, on the other hand, wonder at the world hating the 
name, and attaching to it a very different meaning from 
that which it probably bears. 

Of the division and dissension between the world and 
the Church we have before spoken. The dissension is 
very ridiculous ; for the Church was ordained for the 
world — for this world, most certainly, as well as the next. 
'Be of good cheer ; I have overcome the world.' But if 
the Church has pretended to be afraid of the world, the 
world, on the other hand, has been disgusted with the 
Church. That has had its experience, and has grown 
sick of saints. ' Saint ' has, since Cromwell's time, been 
a cant word and a phrase of desperate meaning; desperate 
and desperately unpleasant too. ' I am not a saint,' wrote 
Thomas Hood — 

Not one of those self-constituted saints, 

Quacks, not physicians, in the cure of souls ; 

Censors, who sniff out mortal taints, 

And call the Devil over his own coals ; 

Those pseudo Privy Councillors of God 

Who wrote down judgments with a pen hard-nibb'd. 

And yet this very poem, disfigured in one or two places 
by harshness and bad taste though it be, entitles Hood to 
the true appellation. He is a saint now, as we humbly 
believe, and was a saint on earth, sorely tried, but 
sanctified by his baptism and his faith, and owning his 
weakness when he 



206 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Knelt down remote upon the simple sod, 
And sued in forma pauperis to God ! 

And yet such has been for a long time the narrowness of 
feeling on both sides that Hood would have resented as 
an insult the application of the name to him \ and the 
people of any church and of all churches would, at the 
same time, have cast out the gentle professor of literature 
as a Bohemian, as far removed from the right kind of 
professor as the publican was from the Pharisee. 

The modern meaning of ' saint ' is to the world some- 
thing very objectionable, to religious people themselves a 
sneer and a scoff ; but they are chiefly to blame for this. 
The Roman Catholic Church has proved itself non- 
Catholic, i.e., opposite from universal faith, by its narrow- 
ing the very tongue it speaks. Thus, in the ' De Imitatione 
Christi ' of Thomas a Kempis, the very spirit of which is 
Roman Catholic, * bonus religiosusj a good, religious man, 
means a good monk. And in little books in French, 
pious tracts, published ' par une religieusej these words 
mean by a nun. Even in England the same narrowing and 
essentially ungrammatical and ignorant process goes on. 
Messrs. Longmans have lately published a record of Con- 
ventual Life, ' By a Religious ' ! A religious what ? asks 
a grammarian, or any plain scholar not accustomed to 
such a phrase. The adjective is turned into a noun, as 
sanctus has been. A ' religious ' means merely a man or 
woman of a religious order. A, B, C, D, who are merely 



THE 'RELIGIOUS: 207 

men and women, dare not assume that they are religious 

in the cant phrase of the Church. The word only means 

those who have bound themselves by vows. People who 

undertake 

Sufferings Scripture nowhere recommends, 
Devised by self to answer selfish ends, 

are, according to this misplaced and untaught zeal, only 
1 religious ' and ' saints.'' ' Pure religion, and undefiled 
before God and the Father, is this,' says the Apostle, ' to 
visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to 
keep one's self unspotted from the world.' Yes ; but it 
means that you must earn your own living, do your own 
work, and not shut yourself up in a box. What a fool is 
a man to think that he can shut out the world, when it 
lies so closely nestling to his heart ! 

Protestant * religious ' are almost as bad as the wearers 
of black habits, scapularies, and rows of beads. Indeed, 
the latter, with their noble vow of poverty, their real con- 
tempt of personal riches, and one or two other points, go 
far beyond our selfish, narrow, 'religious' people. Hogarth 
draws a picture of such a pinched-up, vinegar damsel of 
fifty going to church in the snow, and dragging behind 
her a miserable page boy to carry her prayer-book ; and 
on this Cowper has written some forcible lines : — 

She, half an angel in her own account, 
Doubts not hereafter with the Saints to mount, 
Though not a grace appears in strictest search, 
But that she fasts, and item, goes to church. 



208 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

And the picture has become famous because it is so true. 
But surely these self-elected people have no claim to 
their great pretence. Is there no holiness, no sanctity in 
continual work, to which most of our poor people are 
bound — work unremitting, and too often unrewarded ? Is 
there nothing blessed in the wearing of a perpetual good- 
nature and cheerfulness which we see some brave men do, 
so strong indeed that wherever they come they bring sun- 
shine into the room ? Is there then nothing holy in a 
mother's patient love, nothing in pain quietly endured, 
watchings often undertaken, sorrows nobly repressed, and 
the poor heart which sighs for sunshine, for some deep 
comfort and some happy days, reproved and kept down 
till it beats in submission to an iron fate ? Is there no 
faith in the toiling father's love, who sees himself, as years 
fall on him, growing old, unnoticed, and unknown — who 
waits patiently to see the sunrise of his children's fortunes 
— who is content to be ignorant that they may be learned, 
starved that they may be fed, soiled and dirty that they 
may be neat and clean — and who brings them to the 
Sunday school, satisfied to be almost a heathen that they 
may catch upon their upturned brows some of the 
cherished grace of Christ? Is there nothing to be said 
of these ? Oh, what selfish people we of the middle and 
richer classes are ! Talk about heroes ! Yes, I am a 
fine hero, I am ! when that poor man who weeds the 
garden, or that pale-faced, bent form who mends my shoes, 



THE LOWLY POOR. 209 

undergoes, without a murmur, more denials in a week than 
I do in a year, and with more humility submits to God. 
1 The night is far spent, the day is at hand ; ' it is time to 
break in pieces some of these old shams, time to vindi- 
cate the good of all people and all faiths, time to cry out 
to the lowly and abased, ' Friends, come up higher ; ' or, 
better still, to get down from our pedestals ourselves, and 
stand below the salt, no higher than our own deeds have 
raised us. 

But, in the first place, we will try to raise the lowly. 
We cannot find fault with the word ( saint.' There are 
saints and there are sinners; Heaven knows that. But 
a man who does his plain duty is a saint, and perhaps a 
man who attempts to do more is a fool. What right have 
we to make the way of life hard to thousands by creating 
an artificial goodness which is no goodness at all ? The 
disciples of Buddha and of Confucius run into the same 
follies as the disciples of the truth \ and it is permitted to 
us who are outside of those ' religious ' to freely express 
our opinions of them. There is a class of devotees, then, 
which devotes itself to awful torments under the notion 
that it will please Buddha. Thus, to please a god is a 
low, villainous, and sneaking notion, which, if applied to 
an earthly king, would be revolting, but which, by a com- 
mon perversion of intellect, is allowed to be used towards 
the All-wise Eternal. These rascally low Buddhists then, 
place hooks in the muscles of their backs, and are whirled 

p 



210 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

round like boys whirl transfixed cockchafers, until they 
faint through sickness and loss of blood. They whip 
themselves with scourges ; they kneel till their knees and 
backs are stiff; they clasp their hands till the nails grow 
through the back ; they hold themselves crosswise until 
their joints stiffen into that fashion; and they are vene- 
rated by others as miracles of piety, and they count them- 
selves sure of heaven, having purchased it by self-imposed 
tortures. So the priests of Baal cut themselves with 
knives, and shed their own blood before their implacable 
divinity, believing that he delighted in cruelty, and that 
his nostrils dilated at the scent of human blood — that 
blood which the Creator has formed so wonderfully, that 
life which He has hedged round with a thousand instincts, 
and which is, if we read His book of nature only, so 
precious in His eyes. 

These, then, are the Buddhist saints; what shall we 
say of them ? 

The good people of China, who follow the wise Con- 
fucius, place around goodness almost as many exclusive 
rules as do the priests of Buddha. It would be tiresome 
to give the rules which Confucius himself laid down as 
necessary to be observed, to show proper respect for the 
emperor, whom he held, scarcely believing in an active 
and omnipotent God, to be the representative of author- 
ity. One, however, was to bow down, to cover the face, 
to enter the presence with lowliest thoughts, to rub the 
forehead on the dust, and to humiliate oneself outwardly, 



S XYLITES. 2ix 

and in the heart to show respect for the Great One. 
' When summoned to an audience with the prince/ says 
a recent writer, ' he ascends the dais, holding up his robe 
with both his hands, his body bent, and he holds his 
breath as if he dared not breathe. When he is carrying 
the sceptre of his prince, he seems to bend his body as if 
he were overwhelmed with its weight. His countenance 
seems to change and look apprehensive, and he drags his 
feet as if they are held by something to the ground.' 

These, then, are the ways by which men, under some 
degrading snare of the tempter, and acting from a de- 
based symbolism, seek to please the All-seeing and the 
All-wise. From a distorted and unwise selfishness, from 
a desire to save self and to save nobody else, these self- 
elected saints laid burdens on themselves which God 
never laid, put stumbling-blocks in their brothers' way, 
bent the form created after God's own image, denied 
themselves the kindly pleasures of life and the kindly 
fruits of the earth, have quenched wholesome desires, 
which God created, expelled wholesome love, which God 
gave, and dwarfed down the huge amplitude of life, whose 
circle is the whole world, to the narrow top of a pillar 
three feet in diameter. Yes, upon a pillar of gradually 
increased heights, one of the Stylites, or pillar-saints (for 
there were many — three famous ones, Simeon, Julian, and 
Daniel), spent fifty years of his life praying so many times 
a day that it is impossible to count how many prayers he 



212 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

said ; and this man, Theodoret would have us believe, 
is the blessed Simeon, chosen by God from his birth to 
study how to obey and to please Him.' This is he of 
whom Tennyson writes, making him cry out thus : — 

Let this avail, just, dreadful, mighty God, 

This not be all in vain, that thrice ten years, 

Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs, 

In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and colds, 

In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes, and cramps, 

A sign between the meadow and the cloud. 

Patient, on this tall pillar, I have borne 

Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet and snow. 

And then, introduced with admirable art, the poet 
suggests the reason why St. Simeon Stylites did this : — 

And I had hoped that ere this period closed 
Thou wouldst have caught me up into Thy rest, 
Denying not these weather-beaten limbs 
The meed of saints, the white robe and the palm. 

If so persistent a madman as that ever gets crowned 
with a greater glory than can fall to the lot of any earthly 
monarch ; if he be permitted to let blaze in heaven that 
latent pride which urged him on earth to strive to take 
the kingdom of God by violence, and to be a captain- 
general of self- immolated saints, Heaven will be different 
from that which the New Testament pictures to us. At 
the bottom of this intense madness was a selfishness as 
intense ; and it is notorious, as Gibbon has well pointed 
out, that when saintship pays and offers a lazy life, 



GIBBON ON SAINTSBIP. 213 

surrounding the saint with respectful devotees, daily 
offerings, wonderings, and even prayers, an immense 
number of the vain, the lazy, and the blindly proud 
become devout. When saintship includes daily work in 
daily obscurity, poverty, hunger, and dirt — all undertaken 
and put up with from a sense of duty ; when it calls for 
heroism without the medal and the crown, with no gazette 
to publish the victory ; for martyrdom without the palm, 
the white robe, and the flame of fire playing round the 
head — there are not so many people fond of ' playing ' at 
saints. If we look upon the world reasonably and with, 
a dispassionate eye, it will be hard for us to point out 
any one class which has done true religion more harm 
than these false saints. An author of much merit asserts 
that Bunyan's Pilgrim is a monster of selfishness be- 
cause he leaves his wife and children and only thinks 
of self-salvation. ' What shall / do to be saved ? ' This 
is far too narrow a view to be taken of that work of 
supreme genius and of deep tenderness, but it needs 
very little penetration to see that the goodness of some 
persons is merely a sublimed selfishness, that they really 
do speculate as it were in the heavenly funds, and think 
only of themselves. St. Paul, who would have been 
content to be lost so that others might be saved, is not 
unaware of this secret and bosom sin, and trembles lest, 
having preached to others, he himself ' might be a cast- 
away.' Blind to this insight, some modern saints wear 



2i 4 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

a self-complacent gloss upon their faces which is posi- 
tively sickening. 

Thank God the ages of saint and saintdom are well- 
nigh over, and that there remains to us the harder duty 
of fulfilling the behests of a reasonable religion, and of 
worshipping the true God ' unto whom all hearts be open, 
all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid ; ' 
and what He requires we know. It is not for us to cir- 
cumscribe our path to the top of a pillar smaller than a 
drawing-room table ; it is not for us merely to bury that 
talent He has given us, but to put it out to interest to do 
good, not to ourselves and our own souls only, but to 
those of others ; or, instead of being saints, we shall find 
ourselves miserable sinners indeed. 




CHAPTER XVII. 
LITTLE TRIALS. 




CHAPTER XVII. 

Small trials — Tom Brown on prosperity — Man really dust — 
Elizabethan satirists — The grand style — Easy trials — The 
small ones that wear us out. 

■ELL,' wrote the facetious but often wise 
Tom Brown, in his ' New Maxims of Con- 
versation,' 'this thing call'd Prosperity 
makes a Man strangely insolent and for- 
getful. How contemptibly a Cutler looks at a poor 
Grinder of Knives ; a Physician in a coach at a Farrier a- 
foot ; and a well-known Paul's Church-yard bookseller 
upon one of the trade that sells second-hand books under 
the trees in Morefields!' 

We have used the capitals and italics of the facetious 
Mr. Thomas Brown, so as to put before the reader his 
own style, and to recall the time of his writing. The 
observation is as old as the hills : it is very trite and 



218 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

commonplace. No doubt everybody knows it; but 
Truth has a fashion of being very old, while we have a 
fashion of forgetting it ; so if a writer recalls old truths 
in a pleasant, genial style, he is doing good. As regards 
trifles and little things, everything has been said that can 
be said. ' Sands form a mountain ! ' ' moments make a 
year.' Everything in the world depends on atoms \ and 
so well convinced are all of us of this, that it would be 
waste of time to go over any instances. We are all 
atomical; nay, Chemistry will tell us that we are less 
than atoms : we are gases and vapours. Proud man is 
less than dust : he is a breath. His life is not worth a 
pin's fee : he may be deprived of it by a hair in a draught 
of milk, a grape-stone in a cup of wine, a grain of sand, 
which, Pascal tells us, caused the death of Cromwell, or 
a tin tack in a basin of soup, with which a year or two 
ago a London merchant was ' done to death.' We march 
upon graves : the very dust we tread upon once lived ; 
nay, we feed upon our ancestors. The sheep that we eat 
may have cropped grass grown on the graves of our grand- 
sires. The atoms of lime that enter into the composition 
of our bones may have filtered through water which 
passes through the battle graveyards of our Saxon and 
Norman progenitors. 

Trifles we are, and trifles disturb us. In the midst of 
prosperity, when the cutler is indeed looking down on 
the knife-grinder, a speck of dust in his eye will worry 



LITTLE TROUBLES. 219 

him, and take away the force of his proud looks. As a 
beau, in the days of the Regency, passed along the Old 
Palace Yard to one of the brilliant balls given by the 
Prince of Wales, he was rendered wretched for the 
whole evening by a mud-splash on his white silk stocking. 
The great author of a thousand good things, the man 
whose novel is sure to get praised in the ' Daily Jupiter,' 
and of whom the reviews always speak well, is ready to 
burst with envy when one whom he has patronised and 
despised rises, per saltum, over his head, and becomes a 
bright star in the firmament of literature. The first 
author, A, is the same — just as witty, just as clever, just 
as good ; why should he fret at B ? Why should the 
fairest belle of the ball-room, who enjoyed the dance, 
and was the admiration of all, be jealous of the darkest 
beauty to whom all eyes are turned? This trifling 
jealousy, so native to the hearts of authors, artists, and 
women— and, in good truth, women are the most strong- 
minded and the noblest of the three — is laughable to the 
world, but exceedingly hurtful to themselves. 

Looking up to Shakspeare as we do, it is lucky for 
him that ignorance of all his life-doings has kept from us 
the envying, hatred, back-biting, lying, and slandering to 
which he must have been subjected, and which, perhaps, 
he felt and gave vent to. Thank Heaven, we do not 
know that he did. We know that Ben Jonson gave one 
or two spiteful things among the many noble ones he said 



220 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

of him ; we know, too, that one of his fellows calls him a 

great Shake-scene, and puns, in an ill-natured, spiteful way, 

upon his furnishing whole Hamlets of plays ; but we do 

not know that Shakspeare uttered one ill-natured word in 

return. Now, of Ben Jonson and Dekker we read the 

quarrels. 'Ben,' said Drummond, 'was a great lover 

and praiser of himself; a condemner and scorner of 

others ; given rather to lose a friend than a jest ; jealous 

of every word and action of those about him.' Such a 

man could well attack Marston and Dekker in the 

' Poetaster,' and the last could well return the abuse in 

' Satiromastix.' And yet these men were poets and true 

teachers — the very cream of the cream of the wits of 

the day ! Were we any better in Pope's time ? Dryden, 

his great master, had a life embittered by petty silly 

attacks, which drew from him such tremendous satire, 

that it seems to have done all in that way that could have 

been done ; but, alas ! what an occupation for a great 

intellect ! And Pope — so early wise, so neat, so clever, 

so pure, so brilliant, so full of point and epigram — Pope, 

too, could devote his powerful intellect to the abuse of 

women ; could vent spite like an angry cat, and absolutely 

deserve the rebuff, cruel though it was, of Lord Hervey 

and Lady M. W. Montagu : ' Is this the thing to keep 

mankind in awe — 

If limbs unbroken, skin without a stain, 
Unwhipped, unblanketed, unkick'd, unslain, 
That wretched little carcase you retain — 



DRYDEN AND GIFFORD. 221 

it is only because you are like a note of interrogation, a 
crooked little thing that asks impertinent questions.' 
Such, in effect, is the answer that these people give to a 
great, good, and on the whole a tender-hearted man. 
Is the spectacle an improving one ? Would it not have 
been better that all the private life of Pope and Gold- 
smith, and Jonson and Dryden, had been buried for ever 
in oblivion ? 

Sometimes it may console us to reflect, when we have 
yielded to such petty annoyances, that greater men than 
we have been as weak. But this is but a poor consola- 
tion. It consoles us to think that great men have lived 
who have been reviled, and reviled not again ; whose lives 
have been as calm as heaven, and whose souls almost 
as pure \ rather than to imagine that we are all so little that 
a small annoyance like a grain of sand will wear away 
and injure alike the finest mechanism of the mind or the 
watch. A good armour against little troubles is furnished 
by selfishness and conceit. A thick skin does not care 
for a scratch, and there are some men so dull of compre- 
hension of anything against themselves that they can bear 
unmoved the satire of a Dryden or the invective of a 
Gifford. But this kind of defence is not to be envied : it 
is certainly the thickness of skin of the hog or the jackass, 
but it unfortunately carries with it the stupidity and sel- 
fishness of those animals. A better is in an immeasurable 
and, if possible, a well-founded opinion of oneself, such 



222 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

as had the brave Prince Maurice, as a capital anecdote 
will testify : ' And whom do you consider, Prince/ said a 
gentleman to him one day, ' the best soldier in Europe ? ' 
— ' I won't say who is the best,' replied the Prince, ' but 
the Marquis de Spinola is the second best general I 
know '—a delicate and pointed hint as to his own merits. 
Such a man could have heard the praises of a rival sung 
without hurting him ; whereas Napoleon the Great abso- 
lutely detracted from the merits of his bravest marshals, 
and was as jealous of fame as a woman or a poet ; and 
Oliver Goldsmith (who, could he have foreseen his fame 
and influence, how wise and good he has made thousands, 
how he has entered into the hearts of young and old, 
would surely have been content) used to fume and fret, 
nay, would ridiculously interrupt the company when he 
found the praises and attention lavished on his friend, 
Doctor Johnson, were too strong for his jealous heart. 

Yes, indeed, those are little troubles which arise from 
envy, hatred, and malice ; but they are hard to be borne. 
There are other little troubles in life which are merely 
annoying, but the constant recurrence of which, like the 
constant dropping of water, will wear away the best 
tempers if we do not make head against them. 

At the beginning of this century Beresford published 
his well-known, clever, and amusing little book on the 
1 Miseries of Human Life.' These he treats of in 
various dialogues ; and, but that the fashion of the wit is 



BERESFORBS 'MISERIES: 223 

somewhat antiquated — for although it is not sixty years 
old, it is much more old-fashioned than the wit of Horace 
or of Shakspeare — the book is most amusing still. He 
makes miseries of everything : of watering-places whereto 
people go for health ; of dinners which they give for 
pleasure; of coaches, of horses, of rowing, sailing, riding, 
or driving; of travelling, of inns, of sleeping in strange 
beds, of sporting, of London, of reading and writing, and 
the public press, and a thousand other things. The 
effect of the book was, no doubt, wholesome. The old 
gentleman who gives these lectures to his son and wife, 
and his friend Mr. Sensitive, is one Mr. Testy, senior; 
and his manners . of course depicted in a very ' fat ' 
manner, as the painters say — that is, with gross exaggera- 
tion — are just as farcically absurd as the manners of the 
conventional old-comedy father or tyrant uncle are on the 
stage. Let us imagine a man who, when a candle is in- 
sufficiently extinguished, and, as he says, ' smells under 
his nose,' opens the window, and throws candle and 
candlestick into the street ; who flies into a rage because 
he has to mount up fifty stairs to go to bed ; and who 
thinks it a rare ' misery' if he wishes to spend his holiday 
at Brighton, and he finds the town so full that he is 
obliged to go to Ramsgate, although both towns were 
then nearly equal in fashion. Mr. Testy calls his objur- 
gations and complainings against fortune ' groans ; ' and 
if we cultivate our capacity for groaning in this way, we 



224 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

don't know how much of that kind of noise we may make 
in this world. 

About ten years ago the French followed up this book 
by a volume on the same subject, ' Les petites Miseres 
de la Vie humaine,' and, in point of artistic illustration, 
improved on Mr. Beresford's work, while they fell short 
of him in dry wit and humour. But if there were a whole 
library of books on the subject, the facts would not be 
one whit altered with regard to them : they are — (i) That 
little troubles are, on the whole, much less well borne 
than the greater ones. (2) That great ones drive them 
away, and that upon the pinch of any real necessity they 
disappear. (3) That people well to do, and in what is 
called ' comfortable circumstances/ suffer most from them ; 
and this must follow No. 2, since real troubles, or a great 
trouble, serve all the little ones like Aaron's rod did the 
rods of the Egyptian sorcerers when turned into serpents — 
i.e., they swallow them all up. 

How much soever wise people have insisted upon the 
importance of trifles, there is this much certain, that if 
we pay too much attention to them, we become little in 
ourselves, and incapable of great actions. The drill- 
sergeant is a very fine fellow, and no doubt can see that 
the goose step is well done ; that the men ■ dress ' well, 
and fall into fours with promptitude and level exactness ; 
but he will hardly do to command an army, or to set a 
brigade in motion. So he who attends always to minute 



GREAT MOMENTS. 225 

details may be a very concise and polite man, but he 
never will be fit to grasp large and wide measures : he 
may do for Usher of the Black Rod, but not for Prime 
Minister. He may tell you how a bill is to be introduced, 
and how the matter is debated, but he will hardly hit out 
a grand scheme which will affect mankind. Thackeray 
once wrote — and we have seen the sentence applied to 
trifles — that the ' great moments of life are but moments 
like the others. Your doom is spoken in a word or two. 
A single look from the eyes, a pressure from the hand, 
may decide it ; or of the lips, though they cannot speak.' 
The above is very true, but it hardly proves that those 
moments are trifles. It is a very good argument against 
the sensational school. Great matters do not always go 
off with a bang. It is wonderful in what a common-place 
way a judge will condemn a man to death, and a mur- 
derer will, with a smile on his face, say, * Thank you, my 
lord,' and walk away to his doom. These are but simple 
actions, yet they are not trifles. They may be compared 
to great troubles borne lightly, not to little troubles borne 
gravely : if we once begin to bear our little troubles 
gravely, we shall find that our life will be henceforward 
one of misery. If we choose to make a mountain of a 
mole-hill, we shall find plenty of mole-hills to build a 
perfect Alpine or Himalayan chain. Two people — if 
they but like to set about it in an artistic way— will be 
quite sufficient to make as many little troubles and 

q 



226 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

miseries as one can desire. A man and his wife, if they 
only determine to plague each other — if the wife will 
hate what the husband likes, and the husband will fret at 
what the wife wears, says, and does — will have such a 
crop of little miseries about them, that, if they reap all 
day, they will not be able to harvest them. 

But the brave and true man and woman will go through 
life putting aside these little troubles, just as a gliding 
ship does the ripple of salt and yesty bubbles at its prow. 
Let the cares and anxieties, the worries and little troubles 
of life, grow up about our seed of truth, and we know the 
result — the corn will be choked, and never bring forth. 
But if we determine to bear a calm temper, to be thank- 
ful and enjoy the good we have, to look at the wife that 
God has given us as the most fit for us, and our friends 
and children as the best (under the circumstances) ; to 
believe that a Providence wiser than ourselves has put us 
in our true and best position ; if, moreover, we try and 
think humbly of ourselves, we shall find that little troubles 
will cease to annoy us, that trifles cannot hurt us any 
more than a gnat can sting a rhinoceros ; nay, moreover, 
that our stock of annoyances will no more grow in our 
bosoms than weeds will spring up in a gravel walk after 
it has been well sprinkled with acid and sown with salt. , 




CHAPTER XVIII. 
OF HARD WORK. 



Q 2 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

County Families— ; Pride — A Warrior class — Dignity of La- 
bour — Non-workers unhappy — The curse a blessing — The 
brave Man — The blessings of Work. 

[N the country, where people think differently 
from those in great towns, the head of the 
family — an old family, whose head long years 
ago has been the carver at the table of a king 
— lives in glory as chief of one of the county families. A 
clever scion of the same, educated as a doctor, becomes 
a learned man, rescues, let us say, in the course of a 
useful life, a thousand or five hundred of his fellow-crea- 
tures from death, and heals and comforts thousands. 
Thereby he grows rich, and retires with his ample fortune 
to enjoy himself, and to bask within the prospect of the 
old house. Quite right, too, you say; honoured and 




2 3 o A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

dignified by the good he has done, this man should spend 
a happy old age. But there are mortifications to pride 
in the country, of which the town man knows nothing. 
Our friend the doctor is patronised himself in ' an awful 
way/ and he, with the ladies of his family, are not invited 
to mix with the ladies of the ' county ' family. Well, but 
you cry, they are all of the same flesh and blood. Ay, 
ay, sir ; but county prejudice looks down upon a doctor. 

Do we want any more illustrations of pride, of its 
cruelty, senselessness, and miserable emptiness ? You 
rail against it yourself, and yet encourage it. That which 
is exhibited in the baronet's family is copied in his ser- 
vants' hall. The butler and upper servants are very 
severe and exclusive with the kitchen servants ; while, to 
carry the matter thoroughly out, the kitchen totally over- 
looks the scullery. The ■ gentleman out of livery,' a kind 
of valet, a representative of our old yeoman of the body- 
guard, has nothing to do with the gay gentleman who 
wears livery, who, in his turn, looks down with a lofty 
disdain on the stable-help. So Theodore, the splendidly 
proud King of Abyssinia, kept around him a number of 
courtiers, each of whom, in savage pride, despised the 
other, while the king, at the top, despised them all. 

How much soever in uncivilized society the warrior 
class boasts itself, this hatred and contempt of labour, 
and of money earned by labour, is out of place. It is 
dying out somewhat; that is, so far as it ever can die 



THE DIGNITY OF LABOUR. 231 

out ; and when a noble family wants money, it can form 
a connection with a newly rich man. If it were anything 
but pride it would be a good thing, for it is not well to 
be friendly with a man who has blackened his soul by 
advertising lies, poisoning our minds with deleterious 
literature, or our bodies with bad drugs. But Pride never 
discriminates ; it always licks the dust. When it wants 
money, it bends to all sorts of knaves and fools ; when 
it has plenty, it insults worthy men. Moreover, granted 
that a nobleman in England is the flower of the human 
race, that he has yet the pride of the haute noblesse upon 
him, that he represents (which, in nine cases out of ten, 
he does not) really old blood and gentle culture, that he 
is a peer of the most powerful Queen in the world, — a 
Queen over the third of the human race, — that he has 
ancestral parks, houses, fields, and beautiful domains, he 
must yet own that all this is only rendered possible by 
the labour of those below him. Poets have first imaged, 
then philosophers described, then inventors thought out, 
then lawyers propounded and made safe ; then the artizan 
manufactured and the soldier protected all that makes life 
dear, all that renders us different from Abyssinia, and our 
country a much more easy prey to the foreign foe. And 
where would my lord have been but for those common 
men, Drake, Frobisher, and Raleigh, Duncan, Howe, 
Jervis, Nelson, to say nothing of Clive (a common clerk), 
who gave us India, and the thousands who every day 



232 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

make England what it is ? If our great man reflected as 
he ought to reflect, he would vail his pride a little. It is 
not etiquette for a royal duke to shake hands with a 
subject. Painters (sublime artists, it may be,) are only 
made knights ; the most skilful surgeon in the world merely 
a baronet. Of Armstrong and Whitworth, whose cannon 
may save the nation, the one is unhonoured, the other is 
a mere knight. Mr. Reed, who has reconstructed the 
Navy, is simply Mr. Reed ; Mr. Henry Cole, who has 
done such immense art service in educating our designers 
and manufacturers, is only a C.B., has the privilege of 
wearing a bit of ribbon, in fact ; Mr. Tennyson, who is 
our first poet, who suggests noble thoughts, and gives us 
noble pleasures, and elevated and grand conceptions, is 
still plain Mr. Tennyson. Mr. Dickens, who had done 
wonders for our English literature, and has bound together 
class with class, had no recognition but that of the 
public. And these men are high-class labourers — working 
men, with the brain : nothing more. It is a pity that 
such a fashion obtains, for of old it was not so. The 
men who fought were also the men who wrought. It is 
a curious perversion of the notion of merit that dignity 
should be attached, not to those who do something, but 
to those who do nothing. One of the manliest of all our 
thinkers — Dr. Johnson — was once asked to define a 
gentleman ; and he said bitterly that he was ' one who 
had no visible means of gaining an honest livelihood.' 



LUBBERLAND. 233 

The dignity of labour should be insisted upon by all 
classes. It is, however, so hard to bend the body and the 
mind to continuous exertions, that although the Almighty 
is acknowledged to be the All-worker, yet with man, 
labour has been pronounced as the primal curse. But 
even then one would think that he who underwent his 
sentence — and it was the sentence pronounced upon all 
— was a more worthy man than the do-nothing and the 
skulk, who feed upon the labour of others. True it is 
that effort is to some painful ; but then it should be 
remembered that life at its best is not wholly happy. ' A 
perpetual dream there has been,' wrote Carlyle, 'of 
Paradises, and some luxurious Lubberland, where the 
brooks should run wine, and the trees bend with ready- 
baked viands ; but it was a dream merely, an impossible 
dream. Is not labour the inheritance of man ? And 
what labour for the present is joyous and not grievous ? 
Labour, effort, is the very interruption of that ease, which 
man foolishly enough fancies to be his happiness ; and yet 
without labour there were no ease, no rest so much as 
conceivable. . . . Only in free effort can any blessedness 
be imagined for us.' Therefore is it that in that curious 
book, Sartor Resartus, the same author declares that 
there are but ' two men that he honours, and no third : ' 
the one, the toil-worn craftsman, in whose hand, hard, 
crooked, and coarse, there is yet a ' cunning virtue inde- 



234 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

feasibly royal ; ' the second, him who is seen * toiling for 
the spiritually indispensable — the bread of life.' 

With the labourer, then, and the preacher, this great 
thinker finds that true nobility alone exists. But society, 
always at variance with the philosopher, has by its laws 
set apart another kind of nobility, which lives indeed in 
a luxurious Lubberland of ease ; where brooks do not 
exactly run wine, but where wine is to be had in a much 
more commodious way, where the trees do not bend with 
ready-baked viands, but where all kinds of the most 
luxurious viands are to be had without the slightest effort 
on the part of the consumer. No dream of the idle 
savage ever equalled the reality of the European noble 
or rich man. Not only has he no necessity to work, but 
others work willingly for him, and anticipate his every 
want. Inventors are taxing their busy brains to give 
more novelty. Poets and scholars are working hard to 
give him the best result of thought. Sailors go over 
every sea to bring to him the produce of distant coun- 
tries; politicians, and those who live by the markets, 
watch the thoughts and speculations of men and the 
result of commerce, that thereby he may benefit. If he 
so choose, he may be absolutely lazy. All that society 
asks of him is to spend the money that others earn, and 
that he shall not be either very vicious or absolutely mad. 
This doer of nothing is a descendant, however, from 
some one who has done something. His ancestor may 



NON-LABOURERS. 235 

have been of supreme virtue, and have been ennobled ; 
for the idea embodied in an hereditary nobility is at least 
a pure one — that of rewarding the posterity of the true 
noble ; and, in addition to the amount of ease and luxury 
provided, society points out this man for especial honour, 
and gives him a distinctive mark and title, whereby men 
may know him. 

Is this non-labourer, presuming any such there be, 
absolutely happy ? What is the result of this indulgence 
of society ? Truly we find the primal curse on the whole 
more merciful than man's blessings. These ' precious 
balms ; of society are like those which the Psalmist prays 
against, that break the head of him upon whom they 
descend. It is, however, a significant fact of the nobility 
of England, that they are some of the busiest workers in 
the land. They lead every movement, they are ever 
active. In politics, in sport, in benevolence, and in 
trade, you may pick out many foremost names ; but you 
will always find a nobleman amongst them. They come 
down to the people, and these in their turn rally round 
them. It is a common saying that even a charity dinner 
does not go off well unless there is a lord in the chair to 
read the reports and to talk the usual platitudes. Indeed 
it is a common thing to find that noblemen work a great 
deal harder than many common workpeople. French 
writers have remarked this, and have urged upon their 
own aristocracy the necessity for such labour. It must 



236 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

be apparent to anyone, that the care of a great estate 
necessitates constant work of some sort. If this work 
be not undertaken, the family soon goes to ruin. No 
one can safely trust all his concerns to agents and 
stewards ; and it is in addition to this care that great 
men undertake public work. Let us take two instances ; 
those of the Earl of Shaftesbury and of the Earl of Derby, 
— one a philanthropist and the other a statesman ; it is 
probable that few men in the kingdom have led more 
laborious lives than these. The multiplicity and regu- 
larity of their engagements would strike most of us with 
wonder if they were put before us. The life of Henry, 
Lord Brougham, an ennobled lawyer, was one of inces- 
sant activity ; so incessant, indeed, that at the most 
active period of his life, it is said that he seldom enjoyed 
more than four hours' sleep out of the twenty-four. Few 
men, indeed, could possibly work as he did ; he, and such 
as he, must ever form the exception ; but ordinarily suc- 
cessful and prominent men of rank are all great workers. 
Such men are impelled to work through a necessity in 
their nature. Work, it is said, protects us from three 
great evils — poverty, vice, and ennui. Let us say that 
Fortune has rid them of the first fear, she has only done 
so by making the other two more potent. The idle rich 
are a prey to both of these : vice, which they foolishly 
indulge in for lack of employment ; ennui, or the misery 
of wanting something to do, which constantly assails 



LABOUR. 237 

them, or at best only gives place to remorse for having 
done foolishly. So that labour, after all, is the only wise 
escape for man. 

'Tis the primal curse, 
But soften'd into mercy, made the pledge 
Of cheerful days, and nights without a groan. 

It is, indeed, not only that which supplies means and 
food, but supplies health. The man who has plenty to 
do, is the man who has the blessing of health given him 
to do it with ; and the more he labours the more he 
loves his work. ' I never heard,' wrote a gentleman, ' of 
a true labourer ever getting tired of his work. I never 
heard of an apostle, prophet, or public benefactor, getting 
tired and giving up.' It is quite true, the more a man 
does, the more he wants to do. And what he does he is 
proud of. Coke, of Leicestershire, when made a noble- 
man, was a great deal prouder of the breed of long- 
woolled sheep, which he had introduced and improved, 
than he was of his coronet. It is an old saying, but it 
rs a true one, and will be repeated long after this gene- 
ration of writers and readers is dead, that the bread 
of idleness is bitter, and the bread earned by honest 
labour is sweet. Did you ever black your own boots, 
and not fancy that they were done much better than a 
servant could have done them ? Do you want to make 
a child relish its food, let it have a hand in making the 
pie-crust. Buy your bread with your own hard-earned 



238 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

money, and you will not find it sour, nor will you waste 
it. ' Oh, doctor, doctor ! ' cried a sickly, surfeited, gouty 
patient, to Abernethy, 'what would I not give to get 
well ! What shall I — shall I do ? ' — ' Live on sixpence 
a-day — and earn it] cried the doctor. Truly, no one 
could get much gout out of that. 

Noble is the worker, chiefly because he cannot work 
wholly for himself. The man who digs a field of potatoes, 
who works, and manures the ground, who lays his bones 
to and paves the street, has laid his fellows under some 
obligation to him ; and those who have been idle, mere 
consumers of other men's labour, have not repaid him. 
It is written, indeed, in the Book of God, ' In the sweat 
of thy face shalt thou eat bread,' and far more plainly in 
the Book of Nature; but we never find the sentence, 
'Thou shalt live by the sweat of other men's brows.' 
We watched a stalwart paviour the other day looking at 
a newly-paved road — a. marvellous work of granite — for 
they pave in London better than in any city in the world, 
though the constant traffic makes its pavements worse : 
the man's, eye rested with a loving glance on the truly- 
cut and truly-driven blocks of granite \ and he, too, rose 
in dignity as, he looked upon his work and pronounced 
it good. He was more manly, more dignified, more 
worthy externally,, with his swart face and tense muscles, 
than the silken do-nothing dandy, who trots over that 



HARD WORK. 239 

pavement merely to exercise his limbs, fatigued with 
doing nothing. 

There is another way in which labour is dignified. It 
keeps men innocent while it makes them useful. ' Hard 
work,' says Mr. Helps, 'is a great police agent. If 
everybody worked from morning, and were then carefully 
locked up, the register of crimes would be greatly dimi- 
nished.' Rather let us say entirely exhausted. If we 
could only persuade every person to believe that work of 
some sort is alone noble, that idleness always degrades, 
impoverishes, and finally destroys both man and nations, 
and could thereon urge them to set themselves to some 
work, how much crime might be avoided ! 

But we must remember that it is not only work, but 
good work, that is necessary for us. It is a mistake to 
suppose that thieves are idle, or that the villain and the 
fool do not in some way labour. Work they do, in a 
miserable fashion, and that too for the hardest taskmaster 
in the world — the devil. Dogged by police, betrayed by 
their friends, watched and suspected by all, they have 
indeed hard work, and work that never pays. 

Work that does pay is in the long run its own reward ; 
and that which truly pays is not that which amasses the 
largest heap of gold, but that which acquires for its author 
the greatest satisfaction. In Schiller's fine ' Ballad of the 
Brave Man,' the count offers a purse of gold to anyone 
who will save a family whose lives are endangered on the 
broken bridge by a roaring torrent. The brave man 



240 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

plunges into the stream, dashes his boat against the 
crumbling piles, and rescues the terror-stricken family. 
All applaud him, and the count throws down to him the 
purse of gold. * Give it, sir count,' says the brave man, 
' to those who have lost their all ; I do not want it : I 
never put my life against gold.' Such work as this, or 
any work that is quite truthful, only needs a moderate 
reward to make a man rich. As a rule, the higher the 
work the less the reward. Some men indeed work for 
posterity, and never get paid in this life. Others cannot 
be rewarded. What patient can thoroughly repay a 
good doctor who saves his life ? What pupil can ever 
repay an excellent schoolmaster ? Who can repay 
the father and mother who have taught us religion, 
honesty of purpose, and goodness ? Who can repay the 
writer, who, bending over his desk hour after hour, gives 
back the sweetness of the flowers of thought that he has 
plucked, instilling firmness, goodness, faith, and noble 
thoughts, and amidst a base and degenerating world 
stands firm and true in his devotion to goodness ? All 
such men are above mere payment. They can afford to 
let those who live out of the earnings of the industrious 
grow rich and live in big houses, and be honoured of 
men, while they will be applauded by an innocent con- 
science, and seek the reward of the Great Master. Such 
men indeed are beyond money, and beyond price, and 
most truly uphold the Dignity of Labour. 



CHAPTER XIX. 
AN EMPTY REWARD. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

A Last Infirmity— Different Estimates — Washington — Eliza- 
beth — RaleigKs History — Fame merely Report — Its Emptiness 
— What True Fame should be. 




JAME is a high-sounding word, which has led 
many astray. It is, says Milton, ' that last 
infirmity of noble mind ; ' but whether it be 
so, or the first health, many seem to doubt. 
It is one of those passions which seem very pure and 
very noble at first, but it has led many great men into 
deplorable crimes, and has caused more widows' tears 
and orphans' cries than almost any other. Some persons 
fancy that a love of Fame (Young's ' Universal Passion,' 
by the way,) should be classed amongst the crimes or the 
sins of humanity ; but this, as in everything else in this 
world, has its two sides ; or rather, like a well-cut dia- 



244 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

mond, cut in that way which makes it a ' brilliant,' it has 
many facets, and each of these little faces reflects a 
different colour. We envy a man who has a fair and an 
unstained fame, a man of good report ; and if we could, 
like the Athenians of old, we should probably ostracise 
him ; but we pity him of whom Fame speaks evil ; and 
yet one is just as much fame as the other. Jack Sheppard 
lives in story, while many a noble, virtuous man and 
woman, many a saint once on earth, and now a saint in 
Heaven, is unknown and unheard of. Fame is repre- 
sented as a woman, flying on the wings of the wind, and 
carrying her own trumpet, and she is capricious in her 
favours. 

The aspiring youth that fired the Ephesian dome 
Outlives in fame the pious fool that raised it. 

So it is : we know the name, which we will not repeat, 
of him who set fire to the wonder of the world — the 
Temple of Ephesus; the names of its builders have 
escaped. So again Fame is very forgetful. We know 
not whether we call the pyramids by their right names. 
' Doting in their antiquity,' says Fuller, in his quaint way, 
' they have forgotten the names of their owners.' 'Was 
Cheops or Chyphrenes architect of either pyramid that 
bears his name ? ' asks a poet, with mocking satire. Who 
knows ? We look at a history and it tells us so and so ; 
but soon there comes a man who will re-write that history, 



WHITEWASHING. 245 

and make it very plain to all of us that we have hitherto 
known nothing correctly. 

There is a rumour abroad that in the India House 
Library the books belonging to the great Timour have 
been found ; ' and,' says the scribe who carefully notes 
this, ' such matters have been discovered as will cause 
the history of Mahomet to be re-written ; ' and Mahomet 
may be asserted to be, not the false Mahomet, the dog of 
a prophet, the idiot, or if not idiot, the dupe, but a great 
and God-fearing man, whose work has lived for fourteen 
hundred years, and may live for fourteen hundred more. 
Horace Walpole re-wrote the ' History of Richard the 
Third,' and truly the king seems to have been one of the 
most skilful monarchs we ever had, and certainly as good 
as nine out of ten of them. Mr. William Longman has 
re-written the ' History of Edward the Third.' He has 
brought a few new lights ; but he has enabled us to un- 
derstand how the poor despised English conquered at 
Cressy, simply by being better armed and having more 
efficient weapons than their opponents, although the latter 
were ten to one. Fame has blown her trumpet loudly 
and often falsely for Richard the Third and Edward the 
Third. Perhaps when we know more than we do now, 
some of our heroes will be but images with heads of gold 
Cor brass ?) and feet of clay. 

Will any historian tell us why Colonel George Wash- 
ington was unfaithful to his regimental oath, for he was 



246 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

a soldier on the King's side, and turning against him, 
wrested half a continent from the British,— a British 
soldier himself? When the South and North fought, one 
kind of fame made Stonewall Jackson a hero, another a 
wretched ' Reb ; ' and our American cousins did not 
seem to consider the President of the Southern Republic, 
who acted far less deceptively with them than Wash- 
ington did with us, by any means a hero. Was Lafayette 
a hero, who fought against England and brought revo- 
lution into France ? How about Cromwell ? Is he 
' damned to everlasting fame,' or is he the real Puritan 
King of Men, — the purest, best, wisest, most prayerful, 
and truly loyal man in the whole range of history? 
Choose your sides, gentlemen and ladies ; or, if you 
desire another point, settle that little difficulty about 
Mary, the Queen, and the Queen's Maries. Read John 
Knox and the ballads of the time (there are some 
pretty ones even in so popular a book as Scott's 
' Minstrelsy ') ; — read the evidence about the murder of 
Darnley ; take Mr. Froude and the State papers as 
evidence ; and a more subtle plotter, cruel, shifty, and 
worse woman could hardly have lived. 

The very coins struck in France (you may see them 
in Paris or in the British Museum) will prove that Mary 
laid claim to Elizabeth's dominion ; but in reading Miss 
Strickland we find another kind of Mary, made up of 
beauty, chastity, tenderness, and misfortune. Sir Walter 



THE GREAT-LITTLE. 247 

Scott paints this lady almost as a persecuted saint, and 
talks about the ' murderess Elizabeth ; ' but Walsingham^ 
Elizabeth's prime minister, who, shut in his house, saw 
the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the slaughtered 
Protestants lying in their blood under his window, had 
another tale to tell. 

Let us now look to recent times. At one time no man 
was more hated than the Duke of Wellington ; but Death 
drew aside the veil, and showed us the true hero. Now 
no man is more loved. ' Whatever record leap to life, 
he never shall be shamed,' says the laureate. Can we say 
the same of many other generals ? The will of Napoleon 
proved that he pensioned the would-be assassin of his 
great rival, and proved that to be truth, which, when 
Wellington said it, was put down for mere spite. ' Ah/ 
said the duke, shaking his head, ' Napoleon was a great 
general, but he was sometimes a very little man.' 

The universal love of fame may be proved by a simple 
fact ; the word having a general meaning, either good or 
bad, has been universally accepted as good. Chatterton, 
the poet, wished to be painted as an angel blowing a 
trumpet, with his own name on it. * What shall I do, to 
be for ever known ? ' asks Schiller ; and the question, 
which he turns to a pretty moral in the verses, instantly 
attracts everybody. But fame — <prif*v, report — is, as we 
said, either good or bad. Ben Jonson wrote some admi- 
rable verses, prefixed to Sir Walter Raleigh's ' History of 



248 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

the World/ in which he moralises with a weighty manner 
on the province of history, — 

From Death and da»k Oblivion nigh the same, 
The mistress of man's life, grave Historie, 

Raising the world to good or evil fame, 
Doth vindicate it to eternitie. 

High Providence would so ; that nor the good 
Might be defrauded, nor the great secured, 

But both might know their ways are understood, 
And the reward and punishment assured. 

And there, sure enough, are two figures on the frontis- 
piece, cut by Droeshout, the same who engraved Shak- 
speare's portrait, both with trumpets. That on the right 
side is in pure and silver robes, and she is Good Report, 
Tama bona ; while Evil Report, Tama ma/a, stands 
puffing away with distended cheeks, in a robe covered 
with black and dishonourable spots, stains on the purity 
of Fame, marks to be shunned and hated ; and yet there 
are fools who would rather have a bad fame than none. 

Chaucer, following Virgil, has depicted the house of 
Fame with the many tongues ; and, says Churchill, de- 
scribing the personification,— 

Her lungs in strength all lungs surpass, 
Like her own trumpet, made of brass ; 
Who, with a hundred pair of wings, 
News from the farthest quarters brings ; 
Sees, hears, and tells, untold before, 
All that she hears — and ten times more. 



NOTORIETY. 249 

It follows, as a matter of course, that Fame is a notorious 
liar. ' Never believe half that you hear,' says one ; 
' make it a quarter, and you will be more right,' cries 
another ; but liar as she is, she is an arrant coquette to 
boot. To one man she, like Fortune, gives too much ; 
to no man enough to satisfy him. It has been noted 
that of authors and writers but a small number deserve 
fame and have it ; some neither have it nor deserve it, — 
this is a very large class ; some, who do not deserve it, 
yet get it ; and others, who really deserve much, get none, 
or but little. It is the same with clergymen, painters, 
statesmen, and soldiers ; notoriously so with inventors. 
Amongst them there are dozens who have niched men's 
ideas and leaped into the newspapers, as it were, like the 
Irishman who lived for a whole twelvemonth in Dublin 
on the fame of having written Sterne's ' Tristram Shandy,' 
because he said so, and was the first to get there with a 
copy in his pocket. 

In the first bruit of any fame it is very difficult to tell 
which is the real Simon Pure ; and the world does not 
much care, so that she hears or sees somebody. So a 
doll, which by a clockwork movement graciously bowed 
its head, used to be carried through Paris in the king's 
carriage, and receive the huzzas of the crowd or the shots 
of an assassin. There was a clergyman, we all know, 
who lived on the reputation of having written the ' Burial 
of Sir John Moore,' poor Wolfe's touching ode. How 



250 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

many men have been secretly said to have written 
* Junius's Letters ' ! Sir Philip Francis left at his death 
a copy of the letters, with MS. corrections, and this was 
bought for a member of his family, who, with Lady 
Francis, firmly believed Sir Philip to have been the 
Junius. Yet, as we all know, there are at least four other 
men whose names will live in history with considerable 
claims to the authorship. 

But leaving this part of the matter, let us look upon 
the uncertainty of Fame. Prince George of Denmark 
marries Queen Anne, lives in an atmosphere of fame- 
giving persons, the poets and essayists of the period, is 
a good-natured man himself, dies, and is almost for- 
gotten. Nay, Queen Anne is less known than Blueskin 
or Polly Peachum. But another young and wise foreign 
prince marries an English queen, and having entered 
warmly into a project of an International Exhibition, 
which had been placed before him, becomes famous all 
over Europe, and for all ages. His memorial in Hyde 
Park, commemorating the site of the Exhibition, will 
have a quarter of a million spent upon it, and will no 
doubt be the finest monument of modern times. Un- 
fortunately, composite and elaborate monuments last not. 
It was proposed that the Queen should commemorate 
her husband by a gigantic monolith, or single stone pillar, 
of Aberdeen granite ; that would have lasted for ever, 
until the very age in which we live is forgotten. Now, 



GLORY. 251 

probably in ages yet to come, the wondrous monument 
will be taken to pieces, like that of Mausolus, in the 
British Museum, and the statue will adorn one place, and 
the ornaments of the pediment another, while the bronze 
may be cast into guns or warlike weapons. 

Fame is, after all, evanescent, poor, comfortless. It is 
bestowed upon one man because he is a prince, taken 
from another because he is poor, given to the wrong 
person, and snatched from the true one ; so that, like all 
purely worldly matters, it is not worth having. Get as 
much of it as you can, and you will find it but cold 
comfort : — 

Tis as a snowball, which derives assistance 
From every flake, and yet rolls on the same ; 

Even to an iceberg it may chance to grow, 
But after all 'tis nothing but cold snow. 

Perhaps the wisdom of the English is shown in adopt- 
ing the word fame instead of glory, which, in French, 
means much the same as what we mean by fame. It was 
said of Wellington that he never used the word ' glory.' 
What is true of him is, that he always put the word duty 
as his first aim, and always loved to look, not to his own 
private ends, but to public results. Too used up after 
Waterloo, save to eat something and throw himself on 
his bed, the tears channeled white streaks down his 
battle-stained cheeks the next morning when his secre- 
tary read over the roll-call of the dead, and he wrote 



252 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

thus to his friend : ' I cannot express the regret and 
sorrow I feel at these losses. The glory resulting from 
such actions, so dearly bought, can be no consolation to 
me compared with the loss/ But he hopes that the 
object for which they fought — the peace of Europe — will 
be attained ; and then it is, he says, that the ' glory of 
our friends ' (not his own, mind that) and of the action 
in which they had fallen, will be ' some consolation to 
us for their loss.' Contrast this honest, manly thought, 
written in the first flush of victory, the value of which the 
Duke knew as well as any man, with Napoleon's view of 
glory, and his constant appeals to the passion for it which 
he knew subsisted in his soldiers' breasts. 

It is less to be regretted that Lord Bacon did not 
finish his fragment of an Essay on Fame, since he treated 
it altogether as Report. Thus he says : ' Julius Caesar 
t®ok Pompey unprovided, and laid asleep his industry 
and preparations by a fame that he cunningly gave out 
that Caesar's own soldiers loved him not.' And he again 
returns to this : ' therefore, let all wise governors have a 
watch and care over fames, as they have of the actions 
and designs themselves.' But the specific meaning which 
we attach to it was well known even then ; for he adds : 
' Fame is of that force/ that it is the agent and promoter 
of almost all great actions. Milton is, as he always is, 
noble in definition : — 



MONUMENTS. 253 

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise 

(That last infirmity of noble mind) 

To scorn delight and live laborious days. 

Not, as he afterwards says, that they ever get their 
reward ; but yet, to the good man, the contemplation of 
it is of sufficient recompense and impulse. There is little 
doubt that poets and great writers, great generals, great 
painters, chemists, inventors, and others, feel that fame 
(report) is sufficient reward. ' Report my cause aright,' 
is all that ©thello asks ; and the epigram on Leonidas is 
beautiful in its truthful simplicity : ' Stranger, tell it at 
Lacedaemon that we died here in obedience to her laws ; ' 
that is, that the general and his three hundred laid down 
their lives coolly, resolutely, knowingly, and for duty. 
So a good man, and a true man, can enjoy fame by 
anticipation. Exegi monumentum cere per ennius. ' I have 
raised up a monument more lasting than brass,' says 
Horace of his verses. 

Not marble nor brazen monuments 

Of kings shall outlive this powerful rhyme. 

So wrote Shakspeare, the lemainder of the sonnet giving 
a singular proof that he meant what he said. These men 
knew their power. ' Many shall misunderstand me, but 
I shall live,' is the burden of the generous and pure 
Milton, when he prays for 'fit audience, though few.' 
Report of good actions the soul may rejoice in hearing; 



254 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

and the vanity of wishing to be praised by noble and 
true women and wise and excellent men may perhaps be 
forgiven us ; but, after all, the love of fame is an infirmity, 
although the infirmity of noble minds. He must be a 
weak man who loves to be tickled with compliment, and 
' fed with soft dedication ' all day long. Praise is cream, 
custard, pap ; simple truth is strong meat A good 
action is its own best reward. What does it now matter 
to Jones if he did first invent flat-irons, if Brown took the 
credit ? Both are dead. In the next world, lies, bruits, 
or noises, and voices — especially the voice so oft mis- 
taken, that of Fame — will be dead ; but the voices of 
Conscience and Truth will for ever remain. Our final 
Judge will know, and we shall know, what and how much 
we did : — 

As He pronounces lastly on each deed, 

Of so much fame in Heaven expect thy meed. 




CHAPTER XX. 
SELF GODLINESS. 



CHAPTER XX. 




A Deep Sermon — The Habitations of Mammon — Seeking Sal- 
vation — Theatrical (Godliness — Pharisees — Eggs not to be laid 
on the Sabbath — Selfishness of the Faith of some People- 
Humility. 

HE wisdom of Shakspere is so great, and 
manifestly so wide searching, that it may be 
dissected, and each separate sentence of a 
long speech full of suggestions will be found 
in itself offering most satisfying food for thought. And 
some of these sentences have a kind of recalcitrant sharp- 
ness; that is, they kick or strike backwards as well as 
forwards, and hold a double amount of virtue. Nay, the 
backward reflection is by far the deeper and the sweeter. 
Thus, when Mrs. Quickly is describing the death of Sir 
John Falstajf) a man who lived, as we all know, after this 
world, but who had good qualities sufficient to excite the 

s 



258 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

love of many of his followers, she relates that the dying 
knight called out ' God, God, God ! ' three times, and 
adds a sentence at once comic in its seriousness and 
awful in its satire — ' Now I, to comfort him, bid him 'a 
should not think of God. 3 Was ever a deeper sermon 
preached than that sentence ? Let us imagine the com- 
fort of a dying man, the sands of whose life have decreased 
from thousands to tens, almost to units, who is forced to 
banish the thought of God ! Further, let us regard the 
lesson of the life of such a man, to whom the only comfort 
could be a banishment of good ; whose companion would 
quiet his last despairing cry by the presentation of a yet 
blanker despair. Let us look at the companion herself; 
faithful in her folly, and yet trying to aid her dying master 
by snatching from him the last chance of repentance, and 
plucking off the buds of hope, put forth, alas ! too late, 
too late. Turn the sentence as we will, it is sublime in 
its cruel-kind satire, and is only surpassed by a heavier 
blow in that way from the lips of the Saviour himself, 
when he tells the unjust to make to themselves ' friends 
of the Mammon of unrighteousness ; that when ye fail, 
they may receive you into everlasting or (age-enduring) 
habitations.' What habitations must these be ? 

In another great- play, and equally from the mouth of 
a clownish person — only this one is a he-clown, not a 
she-clown — Shakspere gives us a second sermon in a 
comic sentence, with its deeply serious side. Ophelia, in 



SUICIDE. 259 

her madness, and in disobedience to that fate which is 
closing so darkly around the house of Hamlet, slips into 
a brook and drowns. But this simple death is not enough 
for the lower people, who must still be talking, and the 
very grave-diggers at her burial chatter about her as a 
self-slayer. A sententious, ignorant help to the chief 
digger, using long words, of the meaning of which he is 
ignorant, hits us both ways by this question — ' Is she to 
be buried in Christian burial, that wilfully seeks her own 
salvation ? ' Of course the man means destruction ; and 
the Church, very properly, knowing that he who has 
deserted his post before the fiat of the Chief Commander 
could be no true soldier of the Great Captain of our 
faith, withheld religious ceremony from suicides. They 
had taken such power from the hands of society, and, at 
war with the world and the Church, required not her 
ceremonies to consecrate the ground, nor her lips to 
express a hope of a joyful resurrection. Hence the 
clown's indignation that the poor lady who was self- 
drowned should be buried like others is not unnatural. 
Even in doing evil, says this demagogic grave-maker, we 
poor folks shall do as much as you. If you make fools 
of yourselves, why should we not be allowed to do so ? 
Cleon, Jack Cade, and Catiline would argue just as he 
does. ' The more pity that great folks shall have coun- 
tenance in this world to drown or hang themselves, more 
than their even Christian.' Shakspere's clowns have, 

s 2 



2 6o A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

however, more brains in them than twenty thousand 
demagogues ; and the humour of a man arguing that it 
is a shame that he should not be allowed to hang, drown, 
or pistol himself when he chooses, is exquisite, and quite 
in the open day-light manner of the great author ; whereas 
the humour and wisdom of the other diverted sentence 
is not so apparent, but when seen it is much more 
wondrous. 

* Wilfully seeking our own salvation ' is a grave fault 
with the English and Scotch; and in good truth there 
can hardly be a worse religious error. There is no faith 
in the world that does not condemn it. There is and 
has been no great preacher or teacher in the world who 
did not declare that it was the great duty of man to live 
for others, not for himself, and to die for others, if need 
be, with a total abnegation of self. But personal piety 
in one sense is simply Pharisaism, a kind of self-righteous- 
ness, which it is not too much to say the Saviour's great 
mission was partly undertaken to destroy. The cleanli- 
ness, the lustrations, the ceremonial observance and the 
exercise of personal prayer, personal almsgiving, personal 
presentation before the altar, and in fact of personal 
salvation amongst the most religious of the Jews, were so 
constant, that a man could hardly fail to believe that he 
had won Heaven for himself. The Pharisee took care 
to be instructed in the true sense of Scripture, and he 
believed no doubt perfectly truly. He was wiser than 



PHARISEES. 261 

the Sadducee, who denied the resurrection, and his actions 
were considerably better, and tended to more good than 
many of those whom we should now call good men. In 
the parable the Pharisee recites only a small part of what 
he has done to merit the blessing of God ; and it is to be 
observed that without preface he begins, ' God, / thank 
thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, 
adulterers, or even as this publican (tax-gatherer). I 
fast twice in the week, I give tithe of all that I possess.' 

But he did more than this ; if he had wronged anybody 
he restored what he had wrongfully taken twofold ; he 
never sat down to meals without a prayer; he carefully 
succoured the poor, although he did it with ostentation ; 
he stood up in assemblies and made his prayer openly, 
and he loved assemblies at the corners of wide places 
and squares where he might be seen. He took especial 
care to be observed ; and the Saviour, when addressing 
the multitude and his disciples, remarked of the Pharisees, 
1 all their works they do for to be seen of men,' as we 
lamely translate it, whereas the true sentence, ' Pros to 
theathenai autoisj means, to be theatrically exhibited to 
them, to be done with actual, ostentation and for the sake 
of the show. Hence, too, the ' sounding of a trumpet 
before them,' has been judged by schoolmen, Erasmus 
and Beza, to be a figurative expression, as the word 
hypokritai (whence our hypocrites), means players dis- 
guised in masks. Milton observes that the Saviour, who 



262 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

was meekness itself, lost his temper when speaking of 
these Pharisees : ' Thus Christ himself, the fountain of 
meekness, found acrimony enough to be still galling and 
vexing the prelatical Pharisees.' 

In truth, the religion of those who were so self-righteous 
was opposed in every way to His teaching. His constant 
reference was and is to God ; His determination, to re- 
duce man not to rely upon self, but to abase self; not to 
live for self, but to live for others ; not to depend upon 
the merits of self, but to look for salvation by another. 
It was no wonder then that our ritualistic Pharisees found 
out what sort of an enemy they had to deal with, and at 
once did all they could to slay him. They could not 
well be the active agents, or rather the acting agents, 
because they did not care to soil or pollute themselves 
with blood ; but like the fighting Quaker on board ship, 
who would not fire the gun, but was most active in serving 
out the gunpowder, they were the motive agents of the 
Crucifixion ; and St. Paul, a strict Pharisee, and pupil of 
one of their great doctors, held the clothes of the young 
men who stoned St. Stephen. These men thought they 
were doing God service ; indeed it was their practice to 
search out wickedness and put an end to it ; and in every 
possible way they were just to other men, paying tithe 
of mint and cummin, saying their prayers in the right 
posture, wearing the vestments of the ritual corbals and 
frontlets, or phylacteries, using the same sacred number 



SEPARATISTS. 263 

of repetitions, abstaining from meat, and in a thousand 
ways making life miserable by the burdens of observance 
that they laid upon it. 

The Saviour, who referred all to God, only taking care 
that the heart should be changed, gives, as a contrast to 
the words of the Pharisee, that of the publican, or tribute- 
taker, a man despised and hated, very naturally, as tax- 
gatherers are now not much loved, although they collect 
the taxes which we ourselves impose on ourselves ; but 
when such a man was one who collected the tyrannical 
imposts of the Roman conqueror, it is plain that he must 
have been of a very poor, low class, and without deli- 
cate feeling. This man, ' standing afar off, would not 
lift up so much as his eyes to heaven, but smote upon 
his breast, saying, God, be merciful (or propitious) to 
me, a sinner.' After this heartfelt exclamation, groaned 
out in deep humility, the publican, we are told, went to 
his house justified; our version, in common with the 
invaluable text in the Vatican, reads, 'justified now, or 
rather than the other ; ' but in any way the Pharisee 
receives a great blow, and is plainly and most strongly 
reproved. 

How, indeed, can it be otherwise ? These people, who 
so 'wilfully sought their own salvation,' were by their 
very name separatists. The Hebrew word for them is 
Perushim, separated, to which they added Chasidim, 
godly men or saints, sanctified. They taught that God's 



264 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

goodness could only be extended to their sect to a few, 
and they made the way of salvation so narrow that one 
cannot wonder at their logical conclusion. They counted 
the very letters of the Bible, and knew the centre verse 
and the centre letter, and held certain copies in the 
greatest reverence. They were all for letters, even when 
the spirit said, ' The letter killeth ; ' they were all for 
ceremony ritual. They treated men like children, says a 
writer, ' formalising and defining the minutest particulars 
of ritual observances.' Twice a day they were obliged 
to cry out a noble passage, the shema (Deut. vi. 4-9), 
but even that (and the passage is short) was a monstrous 
burden connected with other things. Certain things 
were clean, others were unclean, with them. An egg laid 
on a feast-day following the Sabbath might ?iot be eaten, 
because it was formed on the Sabbath ! Were there ever 
such strict Sabbatarians ? Again, their symbolism was such 
that it ran into idolatry, and their customs were very 
similar to those of the modern Hindoos, a strict section 
of self-savers, many hundreds of whom died in the Orissa 
famine because they would not eat the flesh of the cow, 
nor drink of the soup made from beef. They had a law 
as to with what sort of wick the candles of the Sabbath 
were to be lighted on the Sabbath eve, and other laws 
which descended to the most minute particulars. No 
wonder that the whole spirit of true religion was destroyed. 
No wonder that God says, ' Your new moons and your 



RABBI SIMEON. 265 

appointed feasts my soul hateth ; they are a trouble unto 
me ; I am weary to bear them.' No wonder that they 
are said to 'bind heavy burdens and grievous to be 
borne, and lay them on men's shoulders,' and that they 
had reduced them to a bondage worse than the Egyptian 
slavery. 

Nor can we wonder at the effect on the pride of men 
produced by a careful carrying out of the petty ceremonial. 
The Pharisee thought that very few people could be 
saved ; and how few, we learn from a curious fragment 
from one of them, Beresith Rabba, which sounds more 
like a translation from the Hindoo than anything else — 
so much do like causes produce like effects. ' Rabbi 
Simeon, son of Jochai, said : the world is not worth 
thirty righteous persons such as our father Abraham. If 
there were only thirty righteous persons in the world, I 
and my son should make two of them : and if there were 
only twenty, I and my son should be of the number; 
and if there were only te*i, I and my son would be of 
them ; and if there were only five, I and my son would 
be of the five : and if there were but two, I and my son 
would be those two ; and if there were but one, myself 
should be that one' We see it all centres in self; and 
though there are many now who in public would be 
ashamed to repeat the above litany of Rabbi Simeon, yet, 
in private, how many look up to God daily and pray for 



2*66 A MAIN'S THOUGHTS. 

self, self, self, and hardly think of their toiling brothers 
and sisters that are around them. 

So far as we can make out, personal religion, if it be 
confined to self, is just the one way which is the worst to 
save a man in this world or the next. It narrows all 
religions ; it breaks men up into sects ; it makes people 
deal out damnation to others ; it is the root of all troubles. 
It is the personally pious king who becomes a slayer of his 
kind. It is the personally good, pious, and prayerful man 
who quietly assists at burning to death another man who 
does not agree with him. It is the personally pious 
child who is taught to glorify itself. There was a tract 
put into our hands the other day relating the death of a 
child about twelve years old, and representing — we hope 
falsely — that the poor child wanted to die, 'because,' 
she said, ' / have seen my angel guard, that is to take me 
up to heaven, and I have seen my harp and my crown — 
oh, they are such beauties ! ' Here selfishness and 
silliness are combined. Is heaven a toyshop ? Is the 
humble soul to be trumpeted into the awe- full presence 
of its Judge ? Is it, indeed — our creed says otherwise — 
to burst from this world into the next at once, without 
the Judgment of the quick and the dead, and to claim its 
reward unabashed from beneath the fiery splendours of 
the great White Throne ? 



CHAPTER XXI. 

FLATTERY AND PLAIN SPEAKING. 



CHAPTER XXL 

A Courtier's Truth — Shade — Love Me, Love My Dog — Alci- 
biades — Raleigh 's Remains — The Worth of Traitors — Flattery 
— A Prevailing Weahiess — Whole Nations Misled — Pepper- 
ing the People — Judicious praise. 

HEY tell a story of King Charles II., which 
has been told of other kings too, but it is so 
much to our purpose that we will repeat it. 
Playing at bowls on a fine sunny afternoon 
at Hampton Court, there was a dispute as to whether the 
king's bowl lay or lay not nearest the Jack. Rochester 
was appealed to, and he, without looking, gave his word 
against the king. ' Odd's fish, man ! ' said the good- 
natured king, ' why, you never looked ; how can you 
judge?' — ' Dost think, sir,' cried Rochester, 'that those 
courtiers would have dared to question you, if you had 
not been shamefully beaten ? ' The king saw the truth, 




270 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

and without measuring, allowed the defeat. Here was a 
direct acknowledgment that flattery is the language of 
Courts. 

It does not matter whether a man be a king or a 
protector; men and women naturally flatter power. 
Queen Elizabeth did not understand much about art, and 
objected to shadow ; her portrait is generally seen without 
shade, and the painter has been much put about to accom- 
plish this ; but Cromwell, seeing that his portrait painter 
had left out an ugly wart, said, ' Nay, friend, paint me 
with my warts/ One king being short, his courtiers wore 
low shoes to make their statures less ; another, being 
bald, wore long wigs, and his courtiers shaved their 
heads ; and all the world of fashion followed suit, and 
wore wigs for a long series of years. What are these 
poor people to do to escape flattery ? This silent kind 
of compliance is insinuating. A sovereign is short, 
and for years her ladies will wear long gowns ; an 
empress is graceful and tall : then short skirts prevail. 
Even wickedness and sin have been made the handles 
of flattery ; a debauched Court makes a wicked country. 
' I do believe, Rochester,' said the same king, Charles II., 
' thou art the wickedest dog in all Christendom ! ' — ' Of 
a subject,' said the courteous earl, with a bow, 'of a 
subject I believe I am ;' and the flattery no doubt pleased 
the king. 

People not only flatter kings, but kings and governors 



ALCIBIADES. 271 

of men flatter the people. ' He who agrees with me I 
deem my friend ; he who dissents from me, my enemy ; ' 
this seems to be the common, foolish idea ; and most 
persons are taken with it. ' Love me, love my dog,' 
embodies the popular prejudice. You like and admire 
the tradesman for his honesty, and the working man for 
his skill, but you are not bound to love his leaders or 
misleaders, his advisers, good or bad, and yet woe unto 
you if you do not. They have busy flatterers about them 
who will do what you disdain. Alcibiades, a great 
soldier, though by no means a man of great honour, was 
a master of this sort of flattery. When he lived at Athens, 
he affected Athenian extravagance, kept race-horses, 
gambled, dressed in the extreme of fashion and luxury, 
and never appeared in public but with a crowd of 
dependents, an equipage of flatterers and servants fol- 
lowing him. The Athenians thereon applauded, and 
loved him ; but when he went to Sparta, which is but a 
few miles from Athens, he conformed to the Spartan 
method, dismissed his retinue, put on a coarse, mean 
habit, and lived as the hardest Spartan. Moving into 
Thrace, this accomplished flatterer put on his military 
habit, strutted about all armed, says Plutarch, and talked 
of nothing but wars and fighting, about which the Thra- 
cians were very hot; and then, flying into the Persian 
dominions, he clothed himself in silks an>d gold, put on an 
Eastern habit, and became a finished Persian debauchee, 



272 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

conforming to luxury and vice as he did before to good- 
ness, honesty, and virtue. 

So Alcibiades was generally liked, as these trimmers 
very often are. But a plague on all such fellows ! say 
we. They are just those that lead the mob to madness, 
fool it to the top of its bent, and never bring the wise 
and thinking portion of the nation into the proper place. 
Wisdom is a rare quality, and resides with the few. 
Folly, like oil upon water, spreads far and wide, and is 
the property of the many. It is by tickling and flattering 
this folly that the insinuating and double-minded man 
lives. What is this tickling King Mob better than plea- 
sing King Despot? When Dionysius the Tyrant was 
dim-sighted and nearly blind, his courtiers, to flatter him, 
pretended it was an epidemic disorder, and pretended to 
be purblind themselves. They tumbled about, groped as 
if they could not see, and threw about the dishes. Does 
not one wish that, in a ridiculous pantomime of the sort, 
a real clown, with a poker really red hot, would come in 
and burn the legs of these old pantaloons of courtiers, 
and suddenly awaken them from their wickedness ? 

To flatter is to soothe, caress, and coax, to persuade a 
man that what he does is right, whether you think so or 
not, and therefore its greatest danger is that it must 
necessarily resemble friendship. Jeremy Collier, a wise 
man, more neglected than he should be, puts it as 'no 
better than interest under the disguise of friendship.' 



FLATTERERS. 273 

For instance, B is a friend of A ; he thinks that whatever 
A does is wise and right, and he says so ; C is a flatterer, 
who, knowing more than B, sees that A does foolish 
things, and yet does not tell him so, but praises his folly. 
How is A to distinguish the truth of B from the untruth 
of C ? Hence Sir Walter Raleigh, in his Remains, says, 
with truth, ' It is hard to know them from friends, they 
are so obsequious and full of protestations ; for as a wolf 
resembleth a dog, so does a flatterer a friend.' This is 
bitter enough from Raleigh, who had fallen through these 
same specious villains ; and again, the good knight, and 
owner of the wisest head left at that time in England for 
that pedant, the King of Scots and English, to take off,, 
returns to his advice, given indeed to his son, but as good 
and as fresh now as then, and as applicable to the people 
as to the sovereign : — 

' Know that flatterers are the worst kind of traitors ; 
for they will strengthen thy imperfections, encourage thee 
in all thy evils, correct thee in nothing, but so shadow 
and paint all thy vices and follies, as thou shalt never, by 
their will, discern good from evil, or vice from virtue.' 

As the aim of flatterers is generally interest, the escape 
from these noxious animals is one of the great blessings 
of poverty. Great men, rich men, and pretty women are 
those who are most subject to them. They court great 
men, not because they are great, but because they are 

T 



274 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

are powerful. They love the places in their gift, not the 
men. 

When the king falls, the flatterer, like a full-fed leech, 
gorged with the blood he has sucked, falls off. The rich 
man is surrounded, by flatterers for that which may drop 
or proceed from him, and the pretty woman for her 
beauty, and for the power which that beauty gives. The 
poor, the ugly, and the lowly escape all this. When the 
banished Duke is in the forest with his faithful lords, he 
finds that life is more sweet than that of Courts, and tells 
his attendant courtiers, his co-mates and brothers in exile, 
that the wind and the cold, the sun and the air, do not 
flatter, but 'feelingly persuade us what we are.' So a 
poor man and an ugly woman hear the truth. Your 
strong, sturdy thief does not try to rob a beggar ; he will 
even sooner throw him a shilling that he has stolen ; nor 
does your poor man get beset with wretches who will 
confuse his brains. He is thought of not sufficient worth ; 
he may understand himself, and make the most of his 
discretion. 

Much as we may rail against flattery, it is very potent ; 
and few people are so poor as not to have a flatterer who 
will soothe their vanity, and make them fancy that their 
attractions are great and unappreciated. Poor Miss 
Squeers, in Dickens's story, is but a vulgar hoyden, with 
red hair, a turn-up nose, and eyes that could hardly be 
called a pair ; and yet she found a servant girl who, poor 



POTENT FLATTERY. 275 

thing ! found it worth her while to flatter her. ' Oh, you 
do look nice, miss, you do ! ' and so on. Happily for J 
human goodness, human nature is so varied, that it i 
just possible that these busy flatterers may be innocent. 
' No fool but finds a greater to admire,' says a satirist ; 
and it may be that even Miss Squeers had some one who 
really liked her. But we may be sure that Miss Squeers 
relished the soft dose. You may spread this sort of 
flattery on with a trowel to most men, and women too. 
One old fellow left money to a man who always told him 
that he looked well. Other men are so tender, that they 
will positively sicken if they are told that they look but 
poorly. One man's- heart is to be gained by the assertion 
that he grows thinner ; the thin man, on the contrary, is 
delighted if he hears that he has gained flesh. 

All potent Flattery, universal lord ! 
Reviled, yet courted ; censured yet adored ! 
How thy strong spell each human bosom draws, 
The very echo to our self-applause ! 

Yes, that is it. Be truly cunning when you flatter, and 
find out what a man or woman is most proud of, and then 
touch up that. Even persuade him that he can see 
through you, knows that you are honest, that it would be 
impossible to deceive him, or to hoodwink him. He is 
so direct, so clever : you might as well seek to race and 
beat an express train with a London cab-horse as to blind 
him ; so 

t 2 



276 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

When I tell him he hates flattery, 

He says he does ! being then most flatter'd ! 

It is a signal misfortune to be constantly flattered and 
to believe our flatterers. If it be misery to lose the eyes 
of the body, to grope about in the world and to be led 
by a child or a dog, it is as great a misery to lose the 
eyes of the mind and to be led by a worse dog and more 
deceitful child. To believe you are wise, and yet to be 
known for a fool, — to have your apparent strength, your 
bulk as Collier puts it, ' to lie mostly in Tumour, and to 
be big with a Bubble, is an unfortunate greatness,' — to 
imagine that you are worth a thousand a year when the 
bank has broken and you have not a penny, is a wretched 
state ; but your flatterer has not only robbed you ; he has 
stripped and beaten you. You were all right until he 
came upon you ; now he has puffed you up, and people 
hate you for the reason of his false glosses. 

The flatterer then is a foe, not a friend, and just about 
the worst enemy a man can have, because he comes to 
him under the mask of friendship. He speaks fair things 
to a man, not from a generous appreciation of goodness, 
but merely for his own purposes, to lull judgment to 
sleep, and then to carry out his own designs : it is thus 
that a true friend is to be distinguished from a false one. 
All people are too apt to fancy themselves wiser and 
better than they really are, — handsomer, more clever, and 
more perfect. 



NATIONAL TETCHINESS. 277 

And of this common failing the flatterer is ready to 
take advantage. He will begin by making all things 
look smooth and pleasant. Belial, ' the least erected 
spirit that fell,' is pictured by Milton as a flatterer, apt 
to make ' the worse appear the better reason.' Whole 
nations suffer by this as well as single persons. There 
are always to be found stump-orators who begin by 
flattering their audience, by dwelling on the power, in- 
dustry, or wisdom of the people, that at last, so poisoned 
are the ears of the multitude, running after these tickling 
and cunning demagogues or people snarers, that good, 
wholesome truth cannot be heard. We have every respect 
for the American republic, and it is therefore with sorrow 
that we have to record, on the authority of the ' North 
American Review,' one of the highest authorities on 
America, that the populace are so inflated with their great- 
ness, that an orator who reproves them is hooted down. 
1 You cannot, you dare not tell the truth to the people ; 
they have for years been accustomed to hear nothing but 
lies.' A certain series of Essays was printed in America ; 
but every word which seemed against popular or American 
feeling was expunged by an American editor before his 
publication was sold ; yet in England, happily some of 
the most unpleasant truths are told in the higher papers, 
and the editors are, as they should be, esteemed. 

In England there has always existed a wholesome 
current of criticism. The proverb goes, that every 



278 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Englishman will have his grumble. Nothing is so good 
at home as it is abroad ; ' they do these things better in 
France ' is a popular expression. Hence, so accusing 
and excusing ourselves, we maintain progress. Let us 
be honest and manly ; let us hear the truth and profit by 
it. The working men may be the most virtuous in the 
world, but it is only flatterers who will tell us so ; and 
while teetotallers endeavour to prove that we are the 
most drunken people, the police, for whom we pay three 
millions annually, affirm that we are the most constant 
in robberies ; so, if this be true, we must have but a poor 
virtue. And when a general election comes, brought in 
with a general fit of rioting and drunkenness, when a 
dozen members at least — shall we say fifty ? — are guilty 
of bribery, what are we to say of the virtue of those who 
take the bribes ! Come, let us be sensible, and own that 
there are plenty of holes in all our coats. The first step 
towards mending a fault is to know where the fault is. 
Those who flatter the populace do so in order to gain 
power, as the fox in the old fable, finding a crow with a 
piece of cheese in its beak, persuaded it to sing. ' Some 
fools say you croak, but I think you sing better than the 
nightingale ; pray give me a few notes/ The crow 
opened its beak to make the effort, and dropped the 
cheese. 

All praise is, however, not flattery : some is so mixed 
and dashed with truth, that, like bad gold coloured with 



CLASS FLA TTER Y. 279 

fine gold, it looks all of a piece. A great orator some- 
times gives us some of this seven-carat gold, made up as 
first-rate. ' When I look on this great country,' he said 
to a popular assemblage of working-men, 'and see the 
millions of houses you have built, the wealth you have 
created, the ships you have freighted with wealth, the 
railways and roads you have formed, .the lands you have 

cultivated, the mines you have explored, I ' and then 

he burst out into a laudation of one class only. But 
such oratory as this is built on a logical fallacy. The 
praise of the riches of England belongs, first, to our 
ancestors, who made wise laws ; secondly, to our reli- 
gious freedom ; and thirdly, to the capital and intelli- 
gence, as well as the industry, of the country. Who 
constructs a railway? — the engineer, who plans and 
invents, or the navvy and the bricklayer ? The engineer 
and the inventor have at least their share, or we might 
as well praise the machines that cut the sleepers and 
moulded the bricks. All honour to hard work, whether 
of the brain or hand ; but to exalt one class at the ex- 
pense of another is to flatter ; and they who are flattered 
know it pretty well too. 

Judicious praise is wholesome and nourishing. The 
young especially should be guided and taught by praise, 
properly mingled with caution and blame. In fact, it is 
no paradox to say that, properly administered, plain 
speaking and even blame is the best part of praise, just 



2 8o A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

as the shadow is oftentimes the finest part of a picture. 
When man, woman, or boy, works well, and does well, it 
is as unwise as it is cruel to withhold what a poet calls 
'the cheerful meed of praise.' It is meed, because it is 
due reward ; and some natures hunger for it. All quickly 
perceptive and feminine natures — all who are authors, 
artists, fine workmen — love it. There is nothing so 
stimulating as honest, judicious, righteous approval ; and 
it may be that in Heaven even we shall hear it. 

But praise and blame must be freely accorded to make 
either efficacious. The plain speaker, who is always 
' telling his mind/ has generally a very unpleasant mind 
to tell. He alone is wise who holds his tongue till the 
right time ; who waits till conscience has done its work, 
and self-approval has bestowed its silent reward. There 
is a famous old quotation from a capital old comedy 
which will fitly close this essay : 'Approbation,' says one 
of the characters with a grateful bow, ' approbation from 
Sir Hubert Stanley is praise indeed.' Sir Hubert 
Stanley's character is given in the phrase. He was no 
flatterer ; no snarling plain-speaker ; but a gentleman of 
honour and of judgment ; free to blame when necessary ; 
equally ready to praise when praise was due. From such 
men a few gracious words are indeed precious ; from a 
flatterer they are worse than worthless : they are poison. 



CHAPTER XXII. 
PEACE AND WAR. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

The Cost of a Conqueror — Life sometimes well lost — London 
Dangers — Firemen — Conquest a Fertilising Lnfluence — Deaths 
along the Coast— London Mortality — The Sword of Gold — 
Worse than War — England at War The Cankers of Peace. 




*NE of our best modern historians has lately 
treated us to one of those pleasant literary 
games which amuse as well as instruct, but 
which are, after all, not thoroughly satis- 
factory. The gentleman writes upon the ' Cost of Napo- 
leon.' He might as well term his article the Cost of 
Ambition, or of War in Modern Times, or the partial 
cost, for no one can tell us the whole cost and the whole 
truth. He presumes, then, let us say, that Napoleon the 
Great — if indeed, in consolidating constitutional liberty in 
France, the present Napoleon may not prove to be much 
the greater of the two — cost France about one million of 



284 A MAJSPS THOUGHTS. 

human lives and five millions of money. That estimate 
appears to us to be very modest indeed. Napoleon cost 
us — the British nation — at a moderate calculation, four 
hundred millions of money ; and how many men, Heaven 
only knows. We, in what we term the Abyssinian war, 
that military promenade into the interior of Africa, for 
which we are to pay the enormous sum of twelve mil- 
lions, killed King Theodore, and luckily lost not a man ; 
but the Crimean war cost us an immense number of 
lives and two hundred millions of pounds. Is this 
dreadful ? We do not think it is. The old song, ' Go 
patter to lubbers,' is in true sailor fashion, and is good 
philosophy. It tells us that a sailor's life is intended to 
be thrown away, and that the right end of life is some- 
times losing it. Visiting a l Fire Station ' one day, 
we marked the great happiness, self-respect, and cleanli- 
ness of the men and their wives — how cheerful they were, 
and how ennobled they seemed to be by their calling. 
These men, perhaps, do not earn much, but every half- 
penny they earn they enjoy. There was the cosy little 
room for man and wife, little kitchen, pantry, all tidy and 
pleasant ; there the warm, good clean bed, from which 
A. B. must be ready to jump up at any moment, to go 
and die a most dreadful death ; there the wife lies alone, 
knowing that her husband has gone out with his life in 
his hand, and may at any time be brought back a black- 
ened corpse, if at all. In thirty-three years we have had 



LONDON FIRES. 285 

in London thirty-five thousand fires. Captain Shaw has 
not given us any statistics of the loss of men, but an ex- 
perienced witness says, ' I fear the list would be long and 
terrible.' 

There are a few notable instances of deaths in that 
way : one man had been but one year in the service 
when he was burnt to death between walls half crushing 
him, while Inspector Braidwood was killed after a service 
of twenty- eight years and six months. Captain Shaw 
himself, after three years' service, fell from a roof forty 
feet high into a fire, and miraculously escaped with his 
life. These brave firemen incur all the danger of a con- 
stant battle ; and, let- us say it, to the honour of our 
human nature, there is not a man, woman, or child that 
does not respect a fireman. We saw one brave fellow 
climb a wall and run, cat-like, in the midst of flames, 
along the edge of a parapet to save a life, and the deep- 
throated shouts of applause which greeted him — shouts 
of joy forced from hundreds of hearts, joy which could 
not be contained nor withheld — were worth a king's 
ransom. Such a man wins his honour, and wears it like 
a crown ; he, too, spends his life. Does he repine at 
his hard fate, and weep mawkish tears about the value of 
human life ? No ; a hundred times, no. Let the friends 
of the felon and the murderer do that ; not he. Like 
Macaulay's soldier, he sings— 



286 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

And how can man die better 

Than facing fearful odds, 
For the ashes of his fathers, 

And the temples of his gods ! 

But you and I, good reader, and our neighbour Jack 
Smith, if we do our duty, are spending our lives in the 
right way ; that is what they were given us for. Desk- 
work may be killing one, and shop-work may be killing 
the other ; happy are we if we work well on this track we 
have chosen or fallen in with. ' Talk about the cost of 
Napoleon/ says a reviewer, ' how many lives has Christi- 
anity cost ? How many perished in the barbarian con- 
quest of Rome, which regenerated Europe?' And we 
may add, how many died in the American civil war, 
which finally stamped out slavery from civilised life ? 
The author of the paper we refer to admits that on the 
whole Napoleon's was a 'fertilising influence.' He is 
right : nothing is so fertilising as blood. 

But not only soldiers die. Mr. Bright, in one of those 
grimly humorous replies in which his sturdy English 
sense stands up, bull-dog like, and shows its teeth against 
the sugar-candy twaddle we so much abhor, once spoke 
these memorable words to the House of Commons : 
' Talk about the dangers of railway travelling — Nonsense ! 
Think of the dangers of the streets ! I'm not sure that a 
first-class railway carriage is not the safest place a man 
can possibly be in for any given length of time.' Cer- 



WASTE OF LIFE. 287 

tainly we are more likely to be killed elsewhere — in a 
shop by gas or by kerosene, as they call mineral oil in our 
colonies and America, which, by the way, is said to have 
destroyed Chicago ; in a house, by drains, fire, infections, 
fever, choking, breaking a blood-vessel, falling ; at sea, 
and so on. 

In ten years we lost on our coasts, from collisions and 
founderings only, 3,847 lives ; from stranded ships with 
bad boats, 4,222 lives ; from boats in getting from the 
ships after collision, 872 lives, so that after they were 
saved they were lost ! But death is at work everywhere. 
Here, in the first quarter of 1870, we have the Registrar- 
General noting down 21,406 deaths in London only. 
There were 8,401 children not five years old among these 
warriors, and 3,605 people of mature age, between forty 
and sixty. 

How many of these perish from really hard work, from 
selfish indulgence, from the greed of others, from the de- 
mands of society — let us say merely those demands, one 
of which is foolish and the other not over-sensible ! The 
foolish one is the custom of eating hot rolls, a dyspeptic, 
unwholesome food, which keeps many a poor baker up 
all night, and sends him into consumption and the grave. 
The other is the demand for the morning newspaper, 
which is brought in, damp and redolent of printer's ink, 
with the hot roll. Mr. Dickens, in a humorous speech 
in aid of the newsvendors, cited a newsman's opinion 



288 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

that the universal passion was to get our newspaper early, 
if possible before anyone else, and to keep it as long as 
possible, always believing that the boy came too early for 
it. But this ' universal passion,' while it employs thou- 
sands of men and boys, and hundreds of machines, and 
supports a very important branch of commerce, a branch 
which in its way adds to the civilisation of the world, 
slays many a man every year as surely as the sword of 
steel. 

' Peace hath her victories, no less renown'd than war/ 
— undoubtedly she has; but those victories are by no 
means bloodless affairs. When the Spaniard Pizarro had 
discovered and conquered Peru, — and his conquest was 
a marvellous one, — he no doubt impressed the Incas, and 
the soft and peaceable inhabitants, with a due sense of 
European superiority by the force of arms. Civilisation 
thus marches onward, and her march is marked with 
human blood. The Peruvians, in their cruel superstitions, 
had a habit of roasting human hearts as a sacrifice to the 
Sun-God, — a habit which the Spanish Roman Catholics 
punished by awful slaughter ; but the sword of the brave 
Spaniard, who at any rate perilled his own life, was a 
mere plaything, a pin's point, to the cruel sword of gold 
which his countrymen used afterwards. There is no 
sadder chapter in history than the utter desolation of Peru, 
and the wearing out with cruel drudgery, with the work 
of beasts of burden, with labour in mines for which they 



COST OF PEA CE. 289 

were totally unfitted, of nearly six millions of people. 
Pizarro landed in 1531 with one hundred and forty men 
(infantry), and thirty-six horses and mounted cavaliers .; 
and, cruel as they were, these, of course, could slay, com- 
paratively, but few. But they who came afterwards, with 
their accursed search for gold, proved what a much more 
deadly weapon the golden sword is than that of steel. 
There is an evil under the sun worse than war. War 
often ennobles. Its praises have been sung by high-minded 
men ; it is, at any rate, not all evil : nor is peace always 
a perfect blessing. 

' Have you ever thought,' asked a philosophic friend, 
' of the cost to us of this long peace with France ? Most 
unthinking people would say that it is all gain ; but it is no 
such thing.' The speaker was essentially a man of peace, 
a man who looks at both sides of a question, one who 
has spent his life in trying to benefit mankind ; and he 
asserted that, while no doubt our manufactures had 
increased and our merchants had grown very rich, the 
working classes had not adequately benefited, and that 
French manners had been imported largely into England, 
with French morals, French plays of the worst kind, a 
French way of regarding Religion and Science, and 
certain matters at the West End of the town, to which 
we cannot more particularly allude. We do not, pur- 
posely, carry this enquiry further. 

u 



290 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

We do but throw this torch into the dark, 
That, dying, it may chance to kindle flame. 

We use the conversation as a hint only, and while fully 
alive to the faults of the great nation over the water, we 
beg to say that we are very much its friends and admirers. 
Our grandfathers, who had their turn at fighting, too, knew 
what were — 

The cankers of a calm world, and a long peace, 

to quote Shakspeare, and went joyously enough to war as 
occasion served, knowing that with many evils it also 
brought some good. In the days of French friendship 
and alliance, in King Charles the First's time, the spirit 
of the nation declined ; but when Cromwell set Richelieu 
at defiance, and did as he liked in helping Protestants, 
up rose the English name, spirit, and happiness once 
more. Again, when Charles II. became the slave of 
France and accepted French money and French mis- 
tresses from a French king, the nation sank to the lowest 
degradation, until the wars of Queen Anne, in which we 
held our own against the ' Mounseers,' and beat them in 
the open field a dozen times. Then the spirit and the 
fortunes of England grew bright again, and we found 
that, however valuable France was as a friend, she was 
at least equally valuable as a foe. 

We know very acute men who argue that it is well to 
be at war. We know that for seven hundred years the 



SWORD OF GOLD. 291 

great men who laid the foundation of that magnificent 
Roman republic which became the mistress of the world, 
took care always to have some war on hand, and ceased 
to observe that rule only when they had nothing to 
overcome. Then came the culmination, — quietude, peace, 
plenty, luxury ; a city crowded with rich people, lazy 
people, people too proud to work, disdaining industry, 
living in utter idleness, and therefore in a terrible amount 
of vice. The sword of gold followed, with its dreadful 
punishments, and a nightmare history, so full of ugly 
forms of sin and shapes of cruelty, that it is distressful to 
read it. The stabber and the murderer were crowned ; 
the city that had become drunken with blood reeled to 
and fro ; the few early Christians, who dared by an 
innocent life to pass censure on these monsters, were torn 
by dogs or crucified alive, or smeared with pitch and set 
on fire, to light the bloated Caesar, as, puffed with pride 
and gluttony, he stalked amidst his slaves to some new 
debauch. It is only in reading some of the dreadful 
prophecies of the Apocalypse, or in recalling to mind 
some of our troubled and distressful dreams, that we can 
realise the state of society into which Rome had fallen 
from the moment when the corrective of danger and of 
war was taken away from her. Is there any need to prove 
that Peace, sitting under her fig-tree, and letting false 
political economy starve half the poor people to death, 
and buy human labour at starvation prices, while it 
u 2 



292 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

mentions something about supply and demand, something 
which drugs its conscience, and which it does not under- 
stand, is not a pretty figure ? — that it is not so holy as a 
war for the truth and the right? After even the few 
figures that we have given, is there any necessity to prove 
that in the race for wealth as many fail as in the race for 
fame 1 We think not. 

The case then eventually forms itself thus : War is a 
state not wholly to be feared \ nor is Peace alone to be 
loved. Peace may be bought at much too dear a rate in 
consenting to evils, in doing an injustice rather than 
fighting, in abandoning one's friends, in deserting abstract 
right, in worshipping a false god, or maintaining, or 
consenting to the maintenance of, a religion you know to 
be false. Is Peace worth having on such terms ? No, 
ten thousand times, no. Then is the time to break with 
your former friend, looking him straight in the face, and 
throwing away the scabbard as you draw the sword. But 
if you preserve the peace basely, if by an unhallowed 
alliance and peace you grow prosperous and rich, you are 
not one whit the happier. The evils of a calm world are 
worse than those of war ; the corruptions kill more than 
the clean-cut wounds. The spirit of a man or of a nation 
is made mean and pitiful by too much wealth ; and the 
demands of Death are by no means slackened, for the 
sword of gold slays as many as the sword of steel. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 
FAITH IN MAN. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

Trust — Piiblic Confidence — Religion — Society — Sweet Simpli- 
city — Little Actions — Anxiety — Distrust — Broken Friendships 
— A Boy's Confidence — Credulity — True Faith — Misery of 
Doubt. 




'OOD faith or Trust is one of the most im- 
portant and beautiful principles of our na- 
ture. On it depends, not only our eternal 
safety, but much of our comfort, prosperity, 
and the happiness of our social relations in this world ; 
in fact, it is the foundation on which the whole of our 
transactions and dealings with our fellow-men must 
mainly rest. It pervades the whole social system, from 
the highest to the lowest of its ramifications, in its most 
important and its most trifling details. 

Statesmen must have some confidence in each other 
to act in concert ; they must be trusted by the nation to 



296 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

carry on its government with any degree of success. 
Mercantile transactions necessarily involve and suppose 
trust in the parties concerned, except in minor and ex- 
ceptional cases, where credit is not at all in question, but 
where the affair is conducted at the moment. Physicians 
have little chance of effecting a cure unless they possess 
the full confidence of their patients ; and it is well known 
that the success which may sometimes attend the treat- 
ment of a quack, in preference to that of a regular prac- 
titioner, is mainly owing to the faith with which he con- 
trives to inspire the invalid. 

The counsels of parents, the instruction given by tutors, 
and the advice of friends, all depend upon the degree of 
confidence felt by the recipient for their acceptance and 
success ; and there can be no doubt that to be able to 
inspire this trust is the great secret of governing, or at 
least, guiding those who are placed under our immediate 
influence and direction. When this is once gained, half, 
or rather three parts, of the difficulty so often complained 
of by those who have, or ought to have, authority over 
others, vanishes at once ; and though there will doubtless 
be always some failures in obedience, some wanderings 
from the path indicated by the superior, there will be 
little resistance and still less irritation on the part of his 
charge. 

We need only refer to the Jesuits, as an illustration, 
not an example, of the wonderful effect of implicit faith 



IMPLICIT FAITH. 297 

and unquestioning obedience; — a principle which has 
given a degree of power unparalleled in a body without 
temporal power, rank, or local territory. It is of course 
carried by them to a most dangerous, some say criminal 
point, destroying the right of private judgment, and all 
sense of right and wrong ; but it is a proof of the power 
of the engine thus employed, and its usefulness, under 
proper limitations ; and when used in a legitimate manner. 
We have spoken of the importance and usefulness of 
this principle ; but it is as beautiful and graceful exer- 
cised to equals as it is valuable in its exercise to superiors. 
What can be more sweet and attractive than the simple 
faith of a child ? — its unquestioning trust in others, its 
unsuspiciousness that any wrong or unkindness can be 
intended? — its sincerity in the care and love of its 
guardians ? Like other attributes of our nature, it loses 
its simplicity and gentleness as time and experience 
unhappily mar its purity and weaken its strength. But 
this is an effect of intercourse with the world, and of the 
growth of less peaceful and less amiable feelings and 
qualities, — of distrust, self-will, and selfishness, — which 
are too often developed by injudicious treatment. But 
the difficulty which certainly attends the preservation of 
this quality, and the shocks to which it is at all times 
exposed, are but additional motives for cultivating it to 
the utmost, and so strengthening and guarding it as to 
keep it, as far as possible, in its original purity, without 



298 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

allowing it to degenerate into its contemptible and dan- 
gerous counterfeit, credulity. 

Let us consider a little the advantages of such efforts 
on our part. First, it is to preserve, so far as we can in 
an imperfect state, that attribute which, as 

Heaven's best gift and friendship's stay, 

was and is a characteristic of innocence. Those who are 
the most conscious that their own feelings and intentions 
are pure, who are the most kindly disposed, and the least 
occupied with self, are not only the most indulgent, but 
the most trusting towards others. They do not suspect 
what they do not feel themselves ; they need strong proof 
ere they will attribute guile when they themselves are 
guileless, unkindness or caprice which they know they 
have not deserved. With them truly ' charity ' goes with 
'faith,' and they view their friends and acquaintances 
through the pure and beautifying glasses which these 
qualities supply to their possessor. 

To indulge suspicion or distrust without most sufficient 
and convincing evidence, is one sad consequence of the 
presence in the heart of the wrong feelings and motives 
thus attributed to others, and of the departure from the 
enviable and lovely simplicity of childhood and innocence. 
And one of the strongest motives and most effectual 
modes for preserving this happy and attractive state of 
mind, is to banish from our own hearts ' all evil towards 



ANXIETY. 299 

our neighbour,' so far as is possible, both in thought, 
word, and deed. Again, this habit of mind is most con- 
ducive to the comfort, both of the individual who culti- 
vates it, and all with whom he comes immediately in 
contact. Nothing can be more destructive to peace than 
a suspicious temper, ready to lay hold of and misinterpret, 
or feel doubtful as to the meaning of every casual word, 
action, or even look. There are so many causes at work 
on every mind which affect the manner, the looks, and 
the minor actions of our every-day life, that incessant 
grounds for surprise, annoyance, and distrust will be 
found by those who cannot, in spite of appearances, trust 
their friends and their acquaintances. 

Secret anxiety, mental pre-occupation, bodily indis- 
position, and perhaps a ruffled temper, may produce an 
air of coldness, reserve, or neglect, when the feelings are 
as warm and kindly as ever. Or a person is led, from 
necessity or some purely accidental reason, to devote his 
attention to a third individual, to the apparent neglect of 
the friend accustomed to share a large portion of his 
conversation and confidence ; then the distrustful temper 
instantly takes umbrage, is astonished, pained, thoroughly 
disturbed, and all peace, comfort, and calmness of temper 
are destroyed, and for the time social enjoyment is 
entirely lost. He, on the contrary, who habitually trusts 
the sincerity and affection of a friend, who takes for 
granted that there may be countless reasons completely 



3 oo A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

unconnected with any change of feeling, preserves his 
happiness and his temper unruffled, has no uneasiness as 
to the stability of the attachment and friendship once 
given to him, and is rewarded by the rapid disappear- 
ance of the temporary cloud, without the serenity of his 
horizon having been disturbed. And the comfort of 
such a temper is assuredly not less to friends than to 
the possessor of it. 

It is a wonderful relief, a most delicious repose, to feel 
certain that we shall not be misunderstood ; that we need 
not watch every look and action, lest it should excite 
distrust; but that we are with those who will trust us 
through the most condemning appearances ; that we need 
not fear, even if grave and pre-occupied, or silent, or 
devoted for the moment to some less valued and intimate 
friend ; but that all this circumstantial evidence will fail 
to make us receive the verdict of ' Guilty,' or even ' Not 
Proven/ as to caprice or change. And even in more 
serious matters, where there are really circumstances 
which seem suspicious, nay, condemnatory, or where the 
voice of slander or envy has been busy, and where, as so 
often happens — 

They who had been friends in youth, 
Ere evil tongues had slander'd truth — 

have their faith severely tried ; yet still we would say — 

Trust the lover, trust the friend, 



BROKEN TRUST. 301 

in the midst of all, till positive proof is given of fickleness, 
treachery, or unworthiness. 

Countless are the friendships broken, engagements 
dissolved, and even husbands and wives, parents and 
children, brothers and sisters, divided, for lack of this 
same blessed quality of trust. Distance would be of 
comparatively small consequence ; the tale-bearer, the 
slanderer, or the plotter would lose their power to sting 
or to estrange ; accidental silence, and mistaken reports, 
would no longer be so fatal to happiness if persons would 
trust each other through good report and evil report, 
through condemnatory appearances, and through the 
ordeal of distance and of time. It is in themselves that 
the fault chiefly lies, not in circumstances ; in their belief, 
not in the reports themselves. We could almost say 
that they deserve more blame than the gossip and the 
slanderer, since their own distrust gave poison to the 
weapon, and pointed the deadly sting, otherwise power- 
less to wound. 

It is quite sufficient when the real, irresistible proof of 
unworthiness comes, to withdraw confidence, and suffer 
the pangs which betrayed affection and friendship must 
necessarily feel, without the heedless risk and additional 
anxiety and suspense of doubt and suspicion. Again, 
there is a wonderful power and safeguard in this same 
trustfulness of temper. It is said that the Rugby boys 
declared ' it was a shame to deceive Dr. Arnold, because 



3 o2 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

he always believed them ; ' and the same remark will 
apply in a majority of cases to those who hold a strong 
and simple faith in those once trusted to the very last 
moment possible. True, there are constant instances of 
betrayed trust and of outraged confidence ; yet there is 
something in this same beautiful unsuspiciousness and 
childish faith, which, like innocence, inspires a love — a 
tender, chivalrous feeling of honour, which makes persons 
shrink from injuring and repaying such trust by treachery 
and deceit. And we believe that the contrary temper, 
like many prophecies, works its own fulfilment of the 
suspicions it is so ready to entertain, and provokes the 
change of feeling, the deceit, and the estrangement which 
it incessantly attributes to others. 

This rule is also especially applicable to those in any 
authority, who too often induce their underlings to practise 
at last in reality that of which they have been suspected. 
They seem to think that they may as well have the faults 
as well as the penalty of misdeeds, and are provoked into 
errors and breaches of faith of which they would other- 
wise have never thought ; while a judicious confidence 
would have appealed to that sense of honour which is 
seldom quite absent from any heart. Unnecessary re- 
straint and suspicion are as mischievous as laxity and 
too great exposure to temptation : but a kind heart and 
tolerable judgment will easily find the medium between 
the extremes. 



PR UDENT SLO WNESS. 303 

This brings us to the last point, on which we would 
offer some suggestions to our readers, especially the 
younger portion of them. 

Credulity and thoughtless readiness to repose confi- 
dence and give friendship or affection, make no part of 
the quality of which we have been speaking, as a general 
temper of mind towards others ; and it is undoubtedly 
right and amiable to believe good till evil is proved — to 
be slow to suspect, and reluctant to imagine, the worst 
motives where others can be fairly attributed. But in 
individual instances there should be prudent slowness in 
yielding that full confidence, and the friendship and love, 
which are the greatest treasures any human being can 
bestow; and which, once given, should be permanent 
and unshaken, save on serious and unmistakable proofs 
of its misplacement. Those who give easily, rapidly, and 
lightly, such regard and trust, usually withdraw with as 
little reason, or else suffer many a bitter trial as the 
reward of their weak imprudence. In fact, this is more 
facility of temper and shallowness of feeling than the true 
friendship of which we have been speaking ; and though 
we confess it is more attractive, and perhaps more amiable, 
than the other extreme of coldness and suspicion, it is a 
dangerous temperament to indulge, and the confidence 
and affection of such persons f are neither of the value 
nor the permanence of more reserved and slower dispo- 
sitions. But, in any case, ' Have faith in others ; ' believe 



3o 4 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

that there are explanations of apparent mysteries, reasons 
for puzzling changes, or even wounding neglect and 
silence, which, when known to us, will be satisfactory 
and soothing to our temporary uneasiness \ and, in con- 
clusion, let us remember that — 

If deceit must vex the heart, 

Who can pass through life without ? 

Better far to feel the smart, 

Than to grieve the soul with doubt. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 
THE GOOD NEWS. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

Clergymen— Dreadful Assurances — Terrifying Words — Too 
Late — Books of Punishments — The Cross — Agony — The Holy 
Office — The Question — Wordsworth — Suggestions — A Glad 
Philosophy — Coleridge — A Death-Bed — The Miserere and 
Gloria Patri. 




[MONGST one hundred thousand clergymen, 
there of course must be many of exquisitely 
bad taste, for the capacity of acquiring 
knowledge up to a certain point, so as to be 
ordained, or even take the B.A. degree, is not, never was, 
and never will be, the same as that of original thought and 
just appreciation. From these men of bad taste we have 
very many sermons, and they being really the body of 
the priesthood, we get the too prevalent and too often 
gloomy view of Christianity which lies about us. It 
happened that on an Easter Sunday, when the Greek 
Church was so ecstatic that its devout members ran about 



308 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

the streets saluting each other with a holy kiss, and 
shouting out ' Christ is risen ! ' ' Christ is risen ! ' we 
heard a good man proclaim the glad tidings, with the 
melancholy assurance that we were all desperate sinners, 
and that about nineteen-twentieths of us would be burnt 
to all eternity. He did not even reassure us, as did 
an American pastor his hearers, with the opinion, that 
after ' being burnt to a crisp ' we should feel no more but 
drop into a painless and quiet annihilation. How calmly 
he droned out this desperate and most awful news, and 
how quietly the village congregation listened to it ; how 
we all knelt at the benediction, and how the ladies hurried 
out of church, and compared notes on their bonnets ; and 
how the farmers in smock-frocks, and the farmers who 
were gentlemen, walked quietly home, talking about the 
crops, the April weather, steam as compared with horse 
ploughing, deep headlands, and improved drainage, my 
readers can imagine. 

It was plain that the parson (and, for truth's sake, we 
must add that he is a good, kindly, hardworking old 
scholar, who periodically knocks himself up in trudging 
from door to door of his wide parish trying to do good,) 
had flown quite over their heads. Either they did not 
understand his sermon, or did not believe in the fate in 
store for them, or they quietly assured themselves that 
they all were of the number of the elect ; for they, to all 
appearance, were as peaceful and at rest as their fathers 



RELATIVE DUTY. 309 

who slept beneath the little grass-grown heaps outside 
the hill-church. Perhaps they did not quite comprehend 
what the parson said, and only accepted his message- 
divine, as did Tennyson's Northern Farmer when he 
said — 

An' I hallus corned to's choorch afoor moy Sally wur dead, 

An' 'eerd un a bummin' awaay loike a buzzard-clock ower my yead, 

An' I niver knaw'd what a mean'd, but I thowt a 'ad summut to 

saay, 
An' I thowt a said what a owt to 'a said, an' I corned awaay. 

In that extraordinary picture from the life, you see the 
old man never really understood what the parson, who 
was buzzing away like a cockchafer over his head, 
preached about ; but anxious that others besides himself 
should do their duty, he went to hear the parson do his ; 
and then, having ' thought that he said what he ought to 
have said,' he (the farmer) ' corned awaay : ' there are a 
great many people whose belief is much like that of the 
farmer. 

If, instead of a country church, we go to a country 
chapel, the result will be the same, or it may be some- 
thing worse. We shall find incapable men, as too often 
we find in many churches, unable to attract their flocks, 
seeking power by terrifying them, just as we see grooms 
who cannot manage a horse, trying to conquer it by con- 
tinued beating. One distinguished preacher, of whom, 
in other matters, we must speak highly, took occasion to 



3io A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

tell his flock that, if they did not heed him, he should 
have the melancholy satisfaction of seeing them 'float 
about in waves of eternal fire, looking vainly up to him 
for aid, while he would remind them of the many times 
he had warned them ; but it would be then too late.' 

The effect of this kind of preaching we may see in 
lunatic asylums, where half the wards are filled with un- 
happy women and men driven out of sanity by the terrors 
vividly portrayed by a bawling preacher who did not 
know what he was saying. 

In the Roman Catholic Church they are not much 
wiser, although there the priests are well under control, 
and the people seek shelter from an outraged Creator, 
and an angry Redeemer, in the soft and pleading interces- 
sion of the Virgin ; but independently of there being no 
warrant for such teaching, they have one or two lively 
works, approved at Rome, in which various torments of 
hell-fire are pictured in vivid illustrations. All the misery, 
trouble, pain, torment, and anxiety that man can imagine 
and picture are in that little book. The author and 
artist seem to have worked together with a love for their 
labour. The acute invention of Dante and of Milton, 
and the devilish cunning of those who were the torturers 
of the Inquisition, or who invented the ingenious devices 
of punishment once in vogue in Venice, seem to have 
been anticipated in favour of the soul in hell. 

And here it may not be out of place to remark upon 



CRUCIFIXION. 311 

the devilish ingenuity of torment and torture. The Jews, 
a merciful people, it is said, knew not the cross till it was 
introduced by the Romans ; but of its torture there can 
be no doubt. For many days, sometimes it is said for 
even three weeks, the crucified were dying ; indeed the 
Jews, to accelerate death, broke their legs, especially if 
the victims were to be taken down so as not to be ex- 
posed on the Sabbath ; but otherwise, naked, and in a 
burning sun, parched with a cruel fever thirst, which gall 
mixed with vinegar could not allay, the feet and hands 
pierced with nails, and the whole weight of the body 
pendent from the accursed tree, so that the muscles were 
torn and disrupted, the pectoral and abdominal bands 
broken, and every ache, and pain, and wound, that could 
be endured and yet leave life was endured, and the 
sufferer cried out in agony for death, and fainted for a 
time, and then swooned into sense and torture again, till 
nature could bear no more. 

Such was the tender mercy of the Roman to his victim ; 
otherwise he was sewn up in skins and worried by dogs, 
smeared with pitch and set fire to, to light a festal night, 
beaten with rods till flesh and muscle were one bruised 
pulp, hanged head downwards. In Christian times, 
those in Roman lands were just as cruel. To be torn to 
pieces by four horses pulling different ways was an easy 
death. Afterwards the Catholic mercies of the Holy Office 
for protecting the faith — thank God, not the faith of 



3 i2 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

Christ, but the dogmas of Rome — exhibited themselves 
in roasting the bottom of the victim's feet, placing his 
head in a helmet, which, as it closed, shot steel pins into 
the ears and eyes ; wedging his crushed foot and leg in 
an iron boot ; breaking him on the wheel, tearing his 
arms and legs out of joint on the rack, placing his head 
under a continual dropping of water till he went raving 
mad, tying a towel over the victim's open mouth, and 
letting water run gently into that mouth until the victim 
burst (this gentle ' question ' was a favourite one for 
women), and many dozen of other ways of, as we said, 
devilish ingenuity, were the methods taken by misguided 
men to ' compel ' their brothers to embrace that religion 
which forbids not only a hard blow, but even a harsh 
look or one ungentle thought. 

Thank Heaven that the time of these persuasives, which 
never ought to have been at all, is now thoroughly passed. 
These tortures, which no one should forget or try to 
ignore, are cited for a purpose, for they show man's way 
of dealing with real or supposed error, and that way we 
hold to be different from God's ; for certainly our 
thoughts are not His thoughts, nor are our ways His 
ways. It is therefore a fair analogy to suppose that 
many, if not all, of the torments dire, the red-hot eternal 
baths, the perpetual snow and ice, the stinking and 
putrid mud in which some are to be plunged headfore- 
most, the glowing and molten copper cowls which others 



WORDSWORTH. 313 

wear, and the whole dreadful paraphernalia which man's 
lawless imagination and uncertain thoughts have invented, 
are after all mere awful chimeras, and can have no foun- 
dation in truth. 

At any rate we are certain that they have little basis 
in the words of Him who spake as no man ever spake, 
and whose approach was heralded by a song of peace on 
earth and good-will towards men, and whose history, 
sayings, and doings are contained in four books, all of 
which bear an old English title — the Holy Gospels, or 
truly, in modern English, '.the Heavenly Glad Tidings.' 

Wordsworth, after standing on Westminster Bridge, 
and seeing a vast city lying asleep before him, took to 
melancholy musings on the selfishness of man. He had 
with poetic fervour blessed the city in one sonnet. In 
another he wrote equally well on this prevailing selfish- 
ness. ' The world,' he said, ' was too much with us, late 
and soon ; getting and spending we lay waste our powers.' 
And then he bursts out. 

Great God ! I'd rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. 

But would he be made less forlorn if he thought that 
the multitude of souls lying in the great city had such a 
future before them ? Would he not have revolted as a 
modern poet of great power has revolted from the notion ? 



3^4 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

He, Mr. Swinburne, does not mince the matter ; he would 
rather restore the old Pantheisms than this troublesome 
and weary worship which blackens and saddens life, and, 
to the large majority, promises only eternal pain. Thus, 
therefore, he cries to the old gods — 

What ailed us, O gods, to desert you 
For creeds that refuse and restrain ? 

Come down and redeem us from virtue, 
Our Lady of Pain. 

Here, at the two opposite poles of poetry, are men different 
from each other, rebelling at a feeling pressed upon them, 
as we believe by a misreading of the glad tidings of which 
we speak. Then comes the question, which should be 
an important one with many thinkers during the year — Is 
this, or is this not, a misreading ? Do our preachers try 
to win us by love to our new-old creed, which in the 
present day seems to be undergoing a new expansion? 
Were the tidings glad, or dreadful ? Was peace, with 
good-will, and all gentle feeling, preached, or not 
preached? Did He, the chief of this religion, attract 
or repel ? Did He and His disciples ' deal damnation 
round the land ' upon all who dissented from them, or 
did He not say, ' He who is not against Me is with 
Me?' 

Did He not come to deliver us from the terror of the 
law, to bid us lay our burdens upon Him ? and was He 
not compassionate and piteous, and did He not declare 



WISE CHEERFULNESS. 315 

that He would give us all inward peace ? Did He not 
expressly exalt Hope to the second place of the three 
grand virtues, of which the chief is universal Love, or 
Charity ? Were not Love and Hope to cast out fear ? 
and, walking between two worlds as we are, on this 
narrow path of life, a birth from an unconscious life 
behind us, and the new birth (which is death) before us, 
can there be any braver or nobler spectacle than to see a 
man walking on joyfully and hopefully, not saddened by 
misfortune, or drunken and dazed by much business, 
enjoying life in a wise prudence, which insures health, 
doing his duty, helping his brothers, and trusting in the 
goodness of his Father to reward him at the last ? 

People may talk about Roman philosophy and Spartan 
heroism a good deal, but they certainly will not, in all the 
annals of haughty Rome or green-clad Greece, excel that 
spectacle ; and it is a spectacle seen in every village, and 
known to every parson, nay, almost to every man. We 
meet with such constantly,— the brave, jolly, hopeful 
man, who accepts life as it is ; who has nothing to tell 
but of God's goodness; who never complains, but rejoices ; 
he, too, has received the ' giad tidings ; ' he knows as well 
as anyone how many are the chances and changes of life ; 
but on he goes, without faltering. Such a man possesses 
a virtue that even Mr. Swinburne would not wish to be 
redeemed from. 

It may be remarked that, as men grow wiser and older 



316 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

they grow generally kinder. It is the firebrand but just 
lighted that spits and sputters so; whereas, when the 
brand glows with a perfect incandescence, it gives warmth 
without smoke or noise. So old and good ministers of 
all sects agree in preaching the glad tidings without any 
of the fear and terror, but with all the love. It was on 
July 13, 1834, that the wise and deep-thinking Coleridge, 
eminently learned in all theology, wrote a letter to his 
godchild, and said, 'with all the experience that more 
than threescore years can give ' — and what years must 
this deeply-learned, most poetic of men, have lived — ' I 
solemnly declare that, although health is a great blessing, 
competence won by honourable industry a blessing, and 
kind, faithful, loving friends, a great blessing,' yet the 
greatest was simply to have accepted the glad tidings, and 
to have been a Christian. Amidst all the troubles of life, 
'sickness, poverty, ill-health, — in great weakness, on a 
sick-bed, without hope of recovery, and without a prospect 
of immediate removal,' this brave, good man, solemnly 
declared in the face of death that his Creator and 
Redeemer ' had supported him with an inward peace and 
joy, and an assurance of never withdrawing His spirit 
from him ; ' so that he felt, and said that all others also 
would feel, ' eminently blessed ' if they began, as he did, 
early to love and trust their God. 

The deaths of many religious men afford lessons of 
testing their lives, but none more so than that of this 



GLORIA PATRL 317 

great poet and theologian. His was not what is called a 
happy life, nor a lucky life ; he was too great to be suc- 
cessful ; he was conscious of an habitual sin or weakness 
which had the mastery over him ; his family was not 
happy, although his children and friends revered him and 
loved him. He was so poor and unappreciated that, 
although the founder of not one, but many eminent 
schools of thought, and to be known more hereafter than 
now, he took refuge in a friend's house, and lived there 
till he died ; his face beaming with sweet joy, a wonder 
and a comfort to all, his tongue eloquent with brave 
sayings of the goodness and greatness of God, his acute 
mind bent on unravelling some knotty point in theology 
or philosophy, he goes on till he is laid up by that thin 
fellow that conquers all the world, Master Death, and, 
when in his clutches, he sent a joyful, gallant, comfortable 
message to his godchild and his friends. If such a life is 
not brave, what is ? And how was this poor invalid and 
pain-wracked hero upheld ? Simply by the glad tidings 
which he knew were true. 

And for ourselves, we are persuaded that too little is 
made of the true comfort and real glad tidings. We are 
always singing the Miserere, and never the Gloria Patri. 
We think much of the terrors, and little of the joys ; we 
hesitate and stumble when we should go forward. But 
upon every trial let as many as think with us make 
up their minds to look joyfully, that is, with a joyful 



318 A MAN'S THOUGHTS. 

wisdom and a wise joyfulness, at life. Man is not to be 
like a timid, trembling dog, which is of no use, but to be 
bold and brave, ' not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, 
serving the Lord, rejoicing always,' knowing that after a 
life which rewards every healthy appetite with pleasure, 
every honest action with content, every free and unfet- 
tered motion with delight ; after a world in which the 
birds, and fishes, and other animals, rejoice in their life, 
and the very trees and flowers tell of joy and content, we 
shall, if we do our honest duty, and no more, receive 
payment far above our merits from the Lord of the Vine- 
yard, if we only humbly and faithfully accept His glad 
tidings, and do not trouble our heads about the melan- 
choly prophets who, for their own amusement only, are 
continually bawling out misery, lamentation, and woe. 




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List of Publications. 3 x 



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32 Sampson Low and Cols List of Publications. 




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